


Welcome to Uncanny Valley

by ortzikara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Anal Sex, Angst, Blow Jobs, Bottom Castiel, Dean Has Issues, DubCon Bordering on NonCon, Dubious Science, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Baggage, Fluff, Kink Meme, M/M, Pre-Teen Castiel, Robot Castiel, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships, Robotics, Rough Sex, Scientist Dean Winchester, Work In Progress, ethical issues related to robot love, it's complicated - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2017-12-29 08:30:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 16
Words: 35,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ortzikara/pseuds/ortzikara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: "Dean, a lonely engineer/scientist, has a secret. He’s attracted to young boys, but he doesn’t want to risk getting caught nor does he actually want to hurt a child. He decides to create robot!Cas, a legal and 'ethical' alternative. Cas is highly advanced and looks like a very real 9-12 year old boy. He can do anything a human could do: he can move, walk, and talk, perform tasks, and can serve as an outlet for Dean’s desires. Though at first Dean only sees him as a very expensive sex toy, he begins to develop feelings for the robot after a while which leads to much angst and thought. Would like to see Dean starting to expect human things out of Cas before catching himself, like telling him to come eat and then remembering Cas can’t eat or asking him his opinions on things before realizing that Cas can’t form opinions, all of his opinions are just programmed in. Dean eventually even wants genuine love from Cas, though he knows he'll probably never get it. Up to author whether or not Cas can ever feel anything back (maybe Dean programs feelings into him? Maybe he’s more advanced than Dean realises? Maybe it’s magic? Maybe it’s Maybelline???)."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from the SPN Kink Meme. Please heed the warnings! This is still a work in progress – I will be posting each chapter here once I've gone through the original version again and fixed up everything that needs fixing. There will most likely be several additional deleted scenes/timestamps at the end once the story is finished... but first things first. Enjoy. :)

Today was the day. Dean tried to eat breakfast as usual, even ran his eyes automatically over the first page of the newspaper, but there was no denying it: his mind was elsewhere. Namely in his state-of-the-art basement laboratory, where he knew Castiel was waiting for him. Waiting to finally come to life.

Okay, so Dean had named an electronic machine. Maybe that wasn’t exactly normal. But by this point he had pretty much given up on ‘normal’. Take a look at his life and you’ll see why.

Dean had dropped out of high school at age 17 to avoid the ignominy of flunking. He’d been too smart for his science classes and bored by everything else – a teacher’s nightmare. Admittedly, there had been one parent-teacher conference in which his physics teacher had told Dean’s father John that his son had the most brilliant mind of any teen he’d ever taught in his ten years at Lawrence High, but John had been nursing a hangover at the time and hadn’t passed this tidbit on, so Dean never knew about it.

He’d left home the day he turned eighteen, only saying goodbye to his kid brother Sam, and had worked his way through two years at state college before he got picked up by a funding program that was trolling for the most promising young minds in science. He’d gotten a full scholarship to UCB for his final two years of undergraduate studies in electrical engineering, and had stayed on at the school to continue doing post-grad research in the field of robotics.

Dean had been within two years of getting his Ph.D. and everything was looking very promising... until the incident with Evan. Evan had been an eager student who had received a national prize for his amateur robotics work, met Dean at a science fair and charmed the pants off him, quite literally. Unfortunately, Evan had also been fourteen years old at the time.

The incident was hushed up by the university with swift and scary effectiveness––after all, Dean was their prize grad student––but all the same, he was ‘asked’ to discontinue his studies there. And so now he found himself living alone in his small house in Oakland, guest-teaching ‘Intro to Electronics’ at the local community college to pay the bills, and spending all his free time tinkering in his basement, which had become a spectacular science facility, putting the rest of his untidy bachelor pad to shame.

After the news of his indiscretion had somehow gotten back to his father, the last shreds of contact he’d been maintaining with John and Sam were destroyed, and now Dean had no one in his life. His years of scientific research and work at the university had left him no chance to make friends, and obviously the question of a relationship was a delicate one in his case.

But a guy’s a guy, and despite his guilt at the memory of the mistakes he’d made with Evan, Dean was pretty desperately lonely by now. And this loneliness had manifested itself in a surprising way. Without even being consciously aware what he was doing at first, Dean had begun building something new about a year ago. It was this new creation that he had christened ‘Castiel’.

The electronic parts were quite simple at their core, but he’d spent an obsessive amount of time on them, constantly testing, improving and refining, bringing the quality of the work higher and higher. Simple concepts had become incredibly complex and intricate interactive systems under his skilled hands: sound synthesizer and voice recognition, light and pressure detectors, logic center, top-notch actuator, huge information database with instant-access capabilities, and all of it connected by a computer running almost two terabytes of RAM. The physical structure was humanoid, including over 4000 moving parts and an outer shell made from a particularly convincing imitation-organic material of his own invention. And today he was going to go downstairs, fire up the computer, and see his creation finally start to walk and talk. He hoped.

Giving up on the farce that was breakfast, Dean dumped his dishes in the sink and headed for the stairs leading down to his lab. At the basement door he paused and wiped his sweaty palms on his shirt before running a hand through his hair. Why was he so nervous? Castiel was just a machine. But there was a trace of shame deep inside Dean, and he knew why. While steadfastly ignoring what it signified, he had ensured that his robot was entirely anatomically correct. And he had designed the physical structure to perfectly resemble a pre-teen boy.

Dean was aware that his tastes were unorthodox, to say the least. He’d known it for about ten years now, but had never given in to it before (or after) Evan. That unfortunate incident had caused him to enter a period of depression and self-imposed celibacy, but he’d finally come to terms with it. His conclusion was simple: it was okay to have these feelings, it just wasn’t okay to act on them. Not when real kids were involved. He would never forgive himself for allowing Evan’s charm and self-possession to blind him to the very real dangers of such a relationship. Not that it had been much of a relationship; more like a flirtation taken too far, enjoying the thrill of the forbidden more than understanding what that forbidden fruit actually was.

But now was not the time to obsess on past mistakes. Now Dean had come up with what could be the perfect solution to his problem: a robot, a real-life android, like something straight out of science fiction. Despite the thousands of hours he’d put into creating this thing, his expectations for the robot weren’t high: a good range of movement, a bit of programming allowing it to carry on some basic conversations, a certain amount of memory storage (to make these conversations less boring and repetitive), a convincing replica of a human body, and a voice recognition capability so it would only respond to Dean.

The voice recognition was very important. If it heard any voice beside Dean’s and its own, it would automatically shut off. Dean wasn’t sure about the limits of child pornography laws, but with his prior conviction he didn’t feel like pushing the envelope. No one else needed to know what this thing was for. Part of the reason he’d worked so hard to make the body look realistic was so that, if someone came to visit (not that anyone ever did), he could tell them Castiel was simply a weirdly lifelike statue. A piece of unsettling modern art, if you will.

And perhaps the most unsettling thing about the robot, now that Dean was standing right in front of it, was the brilliant blue of its eyes. Dean almost wished he’d picked a softer shade. Oh well, he could change that later if he wanted; right now, he couldn’t wait any longer.

Once the mainframe had booted up, Dean gave the start-up and shut-down sections of the programming one more careful read-through. Not that he really believed he would be in any danger from his creation; only in bad sci-fi did robots turn around and attack their makers upon being given life. But he decided to hold tight to the remote control and keep his finger on the ‘emergency de-power’ button, just in case.

The electronic ‘mind’ that was Castiel had three main sections. The two major ones were the mainframe computer that contained all his programming, and the smaller but no less important section that Dean called the ‘mirror’: the electronics inside Castiel’s physical structure which communicated wirelessly with the mainframe, virtually reflecting all his capabilities without having to literally store them inside him. It was as if the largest part of Castiel’s ‘brain’ was stored outside his body.

This mirroring technology would make him able to move around freely, while still having the functionality to be capable of far more than any other humanoid robot ever created. Dean wasn’t sure how far the wireless radius went, but he supposed it acted as another safeguard against a possible robot-attack on the outside world: if Castiel got too far from the mainframe, he would simply stop functioning as soon as he was out of range.

The third part was the little remote control in Dean’s hand. It only had a few options on it––he liked to keep things simple. There were the on and off buttons, of course, as well as the ‘emergency de-power’ option, which would not only turn off the functioning of Castiel’s humanoid structure but would also force-shutdown the entire mainframe computer instantly. Obviously this would not be a great idea; there was the possibility of data loss if he force-quit such a huge and complex program as Castiel. But if the alternative was strangulation at the hands of a rage-filled mechanical Frankenstein’s monster, Dean would prefer to avoid that. So he’d built in the option. (And naturally he had a backup of Castiel stored on a separate computer, although he wasn’t 100% certain that complete recovery would be possible in the case of a crash.)

The final button on the remote control was a simple shock function, such as those on high-tech dog collars. Dean had devised a few extremely primitive ‘pain receptors’ and implanted them in Castiel’s structure, in order to give him yet another safeguard, a form of discipline, if you will. The technical side of it was simple: the ‘pain receptors’ caused a break in his functioning for .25 of a second. Dean wasn’t sure how effective this would be as a punishment or warning tool, but he knew if his own body suddenly broke down completely for even a quarter-second, that certainly wouldn’t be pleasant.

So it was, with all these precautions in place and an extremely thorough knowledge of every quirk in Castiel’s programming, that Dean finally swallowed his fear and pressed the ‘on’ button on the remote.


	2. Chapter 2

If this was a dramatic sci-fi story, we would say at this point: ‘Castiel’s eyes slowly opened’. However, this isn’t sci-fi, merely science. So Castiel’s eyes were already open and had always been, except for the one time when Dean had tested the eyelids by snapping them down and back up after first attaching them. Instead, Castiel’s mouth opened, and not that slowly either.

“Hello world,” said Castiel. He sounded like Stephen Hawking. Dean’s face broke into a huge grin. The one-time start-up sequence had begun. His robot was alive! Well, in a manner of speaking.

Now it was time to go through the various start-up sequence steps, which involved some preliminary calibration and customization. That voice definitely had to go. But he needed to set up the voice and face recognition first. “Hello, Castiel,” said Dean clearly. “I’m Dean.”

Castiel turned his head to follow the sound of Dean’s voice and his big blue eyes stared straight into Dean’s. “Hello, Dean.” Voice and face recognition: check.

Dean headed over to the computer and made some tweaks. “Recite pi,” he ordered Castiel.

“Three point one four one five nine two...” Castiel’s voice was now much more human and appropriate for a boy of the age he appeared to be, if still rather serious-sounding.

“Okay, stop,” Dean said. Castiel stopped. “Take one step forward and turn your head to the right.” Castiel did so. “Crouch down and touch the ground.” Castiel did so. “Stand up again. Lift your left leg at the knee. Touch your head. Close your eyes. Turn around. Lie down on the floor. Get back up. Sit in that chair.” Castiel obeyed every command perfectly. Dean didn’t want to get too smug, but he was pretty damn proud of his own skills. If only he could show Castiel off to somebody. But there was no one to show him off to.

Finally finished with the calibrations, Dean left the computer and returned to Castiel. Technically, he knew the computer actually was most of Castiel, but it was far easier to call this boy-shaped figure in front of him ‘Castiel’. Although to tell the truth it wasn’t _that_ easy, now that he’d said it aloud a few times. Dean had only been talking to his robot for a few minutes and he was already starting to regret giving it such an awkward name. But it was too late to change it now; name recognition was set, and if Dean used any other name, Castiel wouldn’t respond to it.

But a good scientist always tries stuff out. Just to be sure. “Hey, Cas,” Dean said. Silence. The robot did not move. Dean sighed. “Castiel.”

“Yes, Dean?”

“Nothing, just checking.” Wow. He must really have been lonely. He was already being unnecessarily polite to the robot, explaining his own actions to it. This was probably the first sign he was losing his mind. Dean reminded himself to worry about that later, and returned his attention to the figure in front of him. He swallowed. “Castiel, take your clothes off.”

With an economy of movement, Castiel removed all his clothing. He had been created naked, of course, but Dean had found it somehow weird to have a nude, anatomically correct robot standing around his basement all the time, so he’d bought some clothes for Castiel a while ago and dressed him in them. Now, with Castiel’s shirt and jeans lying on the floor, Dean suddenly felt inexplicably awkward. “Okay, get dressed again.” Castiel did so.

Dean let out a long breath. It looked like everything was in full working order. To conclude the start-up sequence and let his robot start functioning on its own, he just had to say the code word. “Well, Castiel... welcome.”

Obviously nothing actually changed in Castiel’s eyes, but to Dean it seemed as if something did. Hesitantly, performing his first unbidden action, the robot turned his head to one side, and then back to center. “Thank you, Dean. I am happy to serve you.”

Dean winced. “Don’t say stuff like that.”

Castiel froze up completely. Dean groaned. He should have known that vague commands involving descriptors such as ‘stuff like that’ would overload the programming. He hit the shock button, hoping it might unfreeze the system.

Castiel frowned. Dean almost jumped for joy. The emotion database was working too! If Castiel had known to respond to something ‘unpleasant’, such as the shock stimulus, with a frown, that meant that even the more complex programming was fully functional. Dean let out a chuckle of satisfaction. “So you don’t like getting shocked, huh?”

“No, I don’t. Please don’t do it again.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You’ve got a attitude, kid! Where’d that come from?” He was only teasing, pleased beyond belief that the logic center and conversation generator were working together so beautifully, but of course the robot interpreted his question literally.

“My attitude is entirely a product of my programming.”

“No shit,” Dean grumbled. “I programmed you. Did you know that?”

Obviously Castiel knew that. But Dean hadn’t had someone to talk to in a while, and it was making him a little giddy.

“I assumed as much,” Castiel replied in what Dean would have sworn up and down was a sarcastic tone.

The scientist grinned broadly, examining his creation as if seeing him for the first time. “You really are something else. Do you know what I made you for, Cas?” Even if the robot couldn’t identify it as his name, Dean couldn’t help throwing in the nickname. It just felt right.

Castiel paused. “I have encountered a logical paradox. I must answer your question with the words I used a few moments ago, but you asked me not to use them again.”

Dean groaned, heading for the computer again to fix this new issue. “Let me guess: you were going to say you’re ‘made to serve me’, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, hang on a sec.” He typed for a minute, paused to think, and then typed some more. “Got it. Castiel, when I say ‘do something’ or ‘don’t do something’, it’s not always an absolute order. From now on, when I tell you to do something and you’re not sure about it, I want you to confirm with me whether it’s an order or not.”

“Yes, Dean.”

Before Dean knew it, he had spent the whole morning in the basement tinkering with Castiel’s programming, adjusting some technical details and catching a few minor bugs in the code. Overall, though, he was stunned by Castiel’s functionality. His response capabilities were virtually flawless, and although his self-initiated action capabilities (SIA, Dean called it, meaning anything Castiel did on his own instead of merely as a direct response to external stimuli) were still limited, they showed signs of promise.

One of Castiel’s special features was a self-monitoring feedback loop that allowed him to effectively learn from his own experiences. After reaching a certain quota of experiences that could be assembled to draw logical conclusions, he would be able to do so. He could also use SIA to improve their interactions, which he started doing after only a few hours: at one point Dean asked him to recap his memories of the last three minutes, and before doing so Castiel said “Dean, you do not have to speak so slowly and clearly to me. I will inform you if I cannot understand you.”

This impressed Dean so much that he had to sit down for a moment. It was a trip, seeing his own creation not only come to life but take initiative and do things on its own. It was like watching your own kid grow up on fast-forward. Which... yeah, Dean didn’t really want to go there.

It was past noon and Dean’s stomach was rumbling dangerously by the time he finally emerged from the basement, followed by Castiel, of course. Something else he had wanted to do was test Castiel’s distance range, but now he was reconsidering. There was really no need to do so, seeing as he didn’t intend to ever take the robot out of the house. And, if he was completely honest with himself, there was another reason as well: he didn’t want to see Castiel reach his limit and switch off, or perhaps even collapse in a heap of lifeless silence. It was a horrid mental image. So that left only one thing to test. But it could wait until after lunch.

His belly full of Philly cheesesteak from the delivery place down the road (Dean had told Castiel to wait in the other room when he went to answer the door), Dean sat back in his chair and took a long swig of beer. And then another one. He didn’t know why he felt like he had to get his nerves up for this. It was just a damn robot.

“Castiel, come here.” He did so, and stood right next to Dean’s chair. “Open your mouth,” Dean told him. When Castiel obeyed, Dean stuck a finger in it. Yup, completely dry. “Okay, generate saliva.” Dean had never given such a weird command in his life.

He waited a few seconds and then put his finger in Castiel’s mouth again. Nice and wet. Perfect. “Okay, um...” God, why did this feel so awkward? One more gulp of beer, then he made himself say it. “Give me a blowjob.”

“Yes, Dean.” Castiel immediately took hold of Dean’s chair and pulled it away from the table, including the occupant, and turned it so he could kneel between Dean’s legs in one smooth motion. Without a pause, he unzipped Dean’s fly, took his cock out, and wrapped his lips around it.

Dean yelped. He hadn’t even had time to get hard. “Wait, hang on! Slow down.” Castiel froze, mouth still in position, and looked up at him through those long dark eyelashes. Wow. Yeah, okay, that helped. Dean could feel the first tendrils of arousal curling in his belly now. He let out a small nervous chuckle. “I just, uh, you know... I’m human, I need a second to catch up with you.” Immediately after saying this, he felt like an idiot. Why was he talking to the robot?

Castiel moved slightly backwards, removing his mouth from around Dean’s length. “Yes, I know.” Was it Dean’s imagination, or was that the snarky tone again, the one that he definitely hadn’t programmed in? No matter, there were more important things to concentrate on right now.

“Don’t, gah, don’t friggin’ stop!” Dean protested.

“Is that an order?”

“YES.”

Castiel let out a tiny sigh and swallowed him down again. The immediate vacuum pressure of his mouth was so intense that Dean instantly forgot to wonder about that sigh. For someone––something––that had never given a blowjob before, Castiel was scarily good at it. He seemed particularly focused as he worked Dean over, alternating between teasing kitten-licks and merciless cheek-hollowing suction at a pace that had Dean feeling like he was going to lose his mind any minute now.

Although he didn’t have the brainpower to reflect upon it at that moment, being too busy coming his brains out down Castiel’s throat and feeling every drop being swallowed down, Dean belatedly realized what this weird focus had actually been as he was gasping for breath and recovering from his orgasm. “Hey,” he said weakly. “Were you, uh... monitoring me?”

Castiel sat back on his haunches, hair slightly mussed from where Dean had grabbed it, eyes as impassive as ever. “Yes. I am able to track your pulse, breathing patterns, pupil dilation and muscle tension in order to provide you with the best possible sexual experience. I trust it was satisfactory.” Was that complacency in the little bastard’s tone?

“Yeah,” Dean huffed in amusement. “It was, uh... satisfactory. More than satisfactory. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Castiel didn’t seem inclined to move from his position on the floor, gazing up at Dean with what almost looked like interest. The bright blue of his eyes suddenly seemed like the perfect color. There was no way Dean would be changing that.

“Do you, um... you don’t... right, of course you don’t. What am I thinking?” Dean muttered to himself in embarrassment. _Obviously robots don’t require reciprocation._ Suddenly it felt uncomfortable to have Castiel’s piercing eyes on him. “Hey, can you go into the other room, please?” Dean asked.

“Of course I can. I can go anywhere. I cannot fly or swim, but all solid surfaces are accessible to me.”

Dean groaned. Literal-minded freak. “Castiel, go into the other room. And shut the door behind you.”

Castiel stood up and did so immediately.

Alone again for the first time since breakfast––although technically he had been alone all day, just like every other day––Dean tucked himself back into his pants and zipped his fly, before standing up on trembling legs. That had definitely been the best oral sex he’d ever received. So why did he feel so strangely unsatisfied now?


	3. Chapter 3

Dean ended up sending Castiel back to the basement after that. He didn’t know why, but he needed a break from the robot’s... intensity. Gah, what the hell was that supposed to mean? A robot couldn’t be ‘intense’! A robot didn’t have a personality! Dean drank two more beers and dozed off in front of the television.

When he woke up, ‘A.I.’ was on. “Ugh,” Dean grumbled, trying to find the remote. “Okay, universe, I get the message. Gotta sort my shit out.” He glanced at the screen. At least it was good to realize that he wasn’t remotely attracted to Haley Joel. He still had some standards... even if he had let a robot suck him off after lunch. Dean winced, finally found the remote and switched off the TV.

He stretched his aching muscles––definitely a bad idea to fall asleep on the couch––and checked his watch. Almost three in the afternoon.

Down in the basement, Castiel was standing perfectly still. “Hi, Cas,” Dean said automatically. No answer. Oh, right. “Hi, Castiel.” Still no answer. Oh, _right_. He’d powered-down the computer. Dean shook his head, feeling like an idiot. It was weird that he couldn’t tell by looking if Castiel was on or off. Those blue eyes stared straight ahead in either case.

Suddenly an idea struck Dean. Leaving the robot turned off, he dug around in his storage closet until he found what he needed, and then set to work. Less than an hour later, Castiel’s translucent blue plastic eyes had LEDs installed behind them. After connecting the new wiring, Dean booted up the mainframe and adjusted the programming accordingly. Now, if he’d done everything correctly, Castiel’s eyes would light up whenever he was turned on, and would stop glowing when he was turned off.

‘Turned on’. Heh. The inner twelve-year-old boy that never completely vanishes from the brain of any adult man caused Dean to smirk to himself at this. Obviously the robot would only ever be able to experience one possible meaning of that phrase. Definitely not the other one. It was silly to imagine that any robot could be wired to feel sexual arousal. All the same, Dean allowed himself to dwell on the problem for a moment. But his normally brilliant engineering mind couldn’t even figure out where to start when developing such a complex tweak to the system. _Being horny: the one true human state,_ Dean thought wryly. _Guess this kid will never know what that’s like._

And there: he’d gone and thought of Castiel in human terms again. Stupid! And even stupider was the slight melancholy he felt at this new realization. So Castiel couldn’t experience sexual pleasure. So what? He was a robot, for fuck’s sake! He couldn’t experience pleasure of any type. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. Dean needed to get over his weird hang-ups and eradicate this irrational guilt complex somehow. And what better way to do that than to officially break his embarrassingly long streak of celibacy, right now, tonight? (He had decided that earlier in the kitchen didn’t count.)

Ignoring the butterflies in his stomach, Dean grabbed the remote and hit the on-button. Castiel’s eyes lit up. He stood perfectly still for a moment, then aimed his gaze at Dean. “Hello, Dean.”

“Hi, Castiel.”

“You changed me.”

Dean’s mouth opened, but he didn’t know what to say. “Uh, yeah,” he finally stammered. “Sorry. I mean, not sorry, that’s dumb. Just, yeah. I put lights in your eyes.” Hearing his own words, Dean could feel himself blushing. Sheesh, what was wrong with him?! Gulping, he forged on. “So I’ll be able to tell when you’re turned on.” Oh God. It would be better just to stop talking right now.

“I see.” Castiel paused. “You seem uncomfortable. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No!” Dean squeaked. He cleared his throat and repeated in a lower tone “No. Not... just yet.” He took a deep breath. “You don’t, uh... you don’t mind, do you? The LEDs, I mean?”

He could have sworn Castiel was turning it over in his mind just like a human being before answering. “I don’t know. I did not expect it.”

Dean jammed his hands in his pockets and couldn’t stop himself from saying again “Sorry.”

“Please give me a moment,” Castiel requested.

Dean frowned. Running through the programming in his head, he couldn’t figure out what his robot was doing right now. But in a few seconds Castiel spoke again.

“No, I don’t believe I ‘mind’.” He still didn’t sound particularly happy. Not that Dean expected him to. Obviously Castiel didn’t have any way to feel happy or unhappy.

“Okay, great.” Jesus. He’d thought creating a robot would eliminate all the awkwardness of human interaction. Apparently that was not the case. Dean could even be awkward when talking to a machine. A wonderful skill to have. He sighed. Well, all or nothing, right?

“Castiel, I want to fuck you.”

“Yes, Dean.” Castiel started towards him.

“Not so fast!” Dean protested.

Castiel continued moving towards him at a slower pace.

“No, just, stop!”

Castiel stopped. And tipped his head slightly to one side. That was weird. Dean couldn’t remember programming that either, or what array of information-receptor feeds could possibly combine to create that reaction. But whatever, no big deal.

“Listen, Cas. Sometimes I’m going to tell you something I want, but it doesn’t mean I want it right away this instant. Okay?”

“Yes, Dean. You do not need to inform me of your intentions. I am––” Castiel cut himself off, before continuing in what sounded like a more cautious tone, attempting to communicate his meaning without using words he knew Dean didn’t like. “I am always ready to be of assistance to you in any way. That is my default state.”

“Yes, I know.” Dean sighed. “Okay, let’s go upstairs now.”

“Yes, Dean. I will automatically follow you everywhere unless you ask me to stay put. You do not need to inform me where we are going.”

“Castiel!” Dean barked. “Shut up.”

Castiel did so. His gaze was very blue, especially now that it glowed.

Dean raised his eyes to heaven before starting to explain. “Look, sometimes I’m going to talk to you like a human. I know it’s not logical. You don’t need to constantly remind me that you’re a robot, okay?” Almost to himself, he added “Maybe I should tone back your SIA a little...”

“You don’t need to adjust me,” Castiel said quickly. “I understand your request and will respond appropriately.”

“Good. Then let’s go.”

They went upstairs and then upstairs again, heading straight for Dean’s bedroom. He had to fight the absurd urge to give Castiel a tour of the house, especially when he noticed the robot looking around the upstairs rooms with apparent interest. Probably absorbing information to be analyzed and logged to the database later.

By the time they reached the bedroom, Dean was pretty turned on. It had been a while. Longer than a while. A damn long time. Long enough that even the prospect of sex with a robot that couldn’t feel anything was making him harden rapidly in his pants. “Get on the bed,” he directed Castiel, already unzipping himself. This was no time for foreplay. And anyway, that would be stupid. The point of this was for Dean to get off. It was basically just masturbation, in a very complicated manner.

This thought gave him some confidence, and he got rid of the rest of his clothes rapidly. When he turned back from dropping his shirt on a chair, he noticed something intriguing: Castiel’s fingers were toying uncertainly with the waistband of his own pants, but then he removed his hand, as if having made a decision. Dean paused and smiled slightly. There was something fascinating about seeing his creation working, its ‘mental processes’ buzzing away, and not even knowing what was going on in there. There were so many potential permutations of input and intra-system communication within Castiel that Dean had to admit he couldn’t deduce exactly what was happening in Castiel’s ‘brain’ at any moment.

Castiel seemed less sure of himself now than he had been earlier in the kitchen, and for some reason Dean really liked it. The small form waiting on the bedspread, those blue eyes staring trustingly up at him... it was perfect. For the first time since he’d switched Castiel on this morning, Dean felt an unadulterated rush of excitement. This was _it,_ exactly what he’d been dreaming of when he first started this project.

He crawled up from the foot of the bed so his body was over Castiel’s. Even at such close quarters, Castiel didn’t blink––obviously––but now the intensity of his electric-blue gaze sent a thrill of heat through Dean’s body instead of making him uncomfortable. Impulsively, Dean pressed a kiss to the lips of the boy––robot––fuck it, _boy_ beneath him. Castiel kissed back eagerly, and Dean almost got lightheaded at how good it was. This part of the programming was clearly flawless. He couldn’t wait to see how well the rest of the sexual-response functioning (SRF, in Dean’s personal lingo) worked.

While licking his way possessively into Castiel’s mouth, which opened willingly to him with a little whimper (oh, _yes_ ), Dean got busy with his hands, unbuttoning Castiel’s jeans and reaching inside them. But when his hand encountered nothing but fleshy softness, he stopped, breathing heavily into Castiel’s mouth. Damn it.

Of course he wasn’t hard; the only SRF capabilities Dean had programmed in were, naturally, those that benefited his own pleasure. Because, he reminded himself (for the second time in the past half-hour), robots can’t feel pleasure. There would have been no point to the trouble and complexity of developing an entire erection-and-ejaculation subsystem for the robot, seeing as it would be purely aesthetic and not related to any actual sensations. All the same, some base-level instinct in Dean was disappointed.

But hey, good timing, he supposed; he had already been getting too focused on the making out, while really this was just about the fucking. And Castiel’s lack of physical response re-set his focus in the right direction. He quickly shucked off the rest of the robot’s clothing and sat back, catching his breath. “Castiel, generate lubricant,” he ordered. It was already starting to feel a bit less weird––if still far from normal––to give these odd commands.

Castiel nodded. Interesting. Dean knew his creation was capable of expressing agreement and disagreement in multiple ways, but he hadn’t been able to guess how Castiel might choose between these various methods. It felt oddly appropriate that at this moment, about to lose his robot virginity, he would come across as incapable of speech.

Dean gave himself a few dry strokes to reach full hardness. He had lube in the bedside table drawer (lots of it, in fact––shut up, a guy has needs, okay?), but the scientist in him wanted to test Castiel’s lubricant-generation system on its own merits. Seeing as the saliva-generation system had worked earlier, this would surely be unproblematic as well. But you never know.

Dean slipped a hand under Castiel’s tiny backside to lift him slightly, and used the index finger of his other hand to tentatively poke inside his tight little hole. Wetness greeted him, and a delirious grin spread across Dean’s face. “I’m a genius,” he whispered.

“Yes, Dean,” Castiel said softly back, and Dean could have sworn at that moment that he saw a spark of amusement shining through the trepidation in the boy’s eyes. Except obviously neither one of those emotions was actually there... _Ah, screw it,_ Dean thought. _I know it’s not real, but I can damn well pretend if I want to. So shut up, brain!_

Purposefully wiping his mind clear like a blank slate, Dean took a deep breath and pushed all the way into Castiel in one long smooth thrust. Just feeling, no thinking. Tabula rasa. Virgin territory. Castiel was so tight it almost made him choke at the sensation. Dean’s eyes were squeezed shut, which meant he didn’t see the strangely fixed expression on the robot’s face.

“Oh shit, Cas... you are fucking amazing,” he breathed.

He heard the whoosh of air coming out of Castiel’s mouth, but no words. The respiration imitator was completely convincing. Bracing himself on one hand, Dean rested the other on the boy’s belly to feel it rise and fall slightly. Miraculous. So real.

Dean pulled out almost all the way and thrust in again, harder. This thing couldn’t feel pain, so there was no need to be gentle. But it was difficult to go against his instinct to be careful with a small, inexperienced body. Dean kept moving, slow but getting faster. God, it felt so _good_ to finally have his dick inside something, after way too damn long.

“Dean,” Castiel said in a thin voice.

“What,” Dean grunted, lost in the sensations. He buried a hand in Castiel’s messy dark hair and then slipped it behind the boy’s neck, pressing their foreheads together as he kept thrusting rhythmically into Cas.

“...I don’t know.”

Dean was too distracted by his own impending orgasm to pay much attention to the strangeness of this answer. So he wasn’t going to last this time, well, you couldn’t fucking blame him. Years of enforced celibacy does that to a guy. He’d have to work on building up his stamina again. Although it didn’t really matter; he didn’t have a partner to worry about pleasing.

It came up on him fast, like a road ending at a sheer drop off a cliff, and Dean went flying over the edge with no restraint. “Uh, Cas...!” he grunted, hips stuttering on one final deep thrust as he spurted deep inside the small body below him.

Castiel’s hands lifted to Dean’s sides and held on tightly. Probably because that was the most reasonable place to set them. When Dean finally lifted his face from where he’d buried it in the boy’s neck, gasping in fresh air as his body thrummed with the aftershocks, he noticed that Castiel’s eyes were closed. Huh.

Dean rolled off him and lay on his back, breathing hard. Okay, so maybe he was a little out of shape too. Whatever. It’s not like he had to impress anybody. This situation, Dean reflected as he waited for his heartbeat to return to normal, was pretty much ideal. So many guys would kill to be in his place. Well, maybe most guys would prefer a somewhat more mature and feminine robot. But the basic idea was the same.

As it always did right after sex, Dean’s mind drifted to the most random things. It had taken him almost fourteen months to make Castiel from start to finish, he reflected, but surely it wouldn’t take that long to recreate his components (with a different chassis, obviously) for someone else. And Dean was sure he could charge exorbitant amounts for a sexbot this well-made. Maybe he’d finally found a get-rich-quick scheme that would actually work.

When Dean glanced over at his robot, he saw that Castiel’s eyes were open again but the lights were off. Immediately dread flooded through him. Fuck. FUCK. Had he broken something? But before he could really start to panic, the two blue LEDs lit up again.

“Castiel,” Dean exclaimed. “You scared me. Why were you off? Are you okay?”

“I believe I was malfunctioning,” Castiel explained, in what seemed to be an even more mechanical tone than usual. “My SIA resolved the problem by doing an automatic reboot from the mainframe. I require fifty-seven seconds more until I am fully reloaded.”

“Oh. Okay.” Dean calmed down, and a thought struck him. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and took hold of Castiel’s body, moving it around so the thin legs were splayed in front of him. Curiously, Dean examined his hole, but it didn’t seem to be leaking. Dean pushed a finger up inside him and wiggled it around.

“Dean!” Castiel said sharply. “I require forty-five seconds more until I am fully reloaded.”

Dean chuckled. “Okay, sheesh, sorry! Guess you don’t need to clean up, do you?”

“I require thirty-eight seconds more until I am fully reloaded,” Castiel answered primly.

Dean’s chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh, and he flopped back on the bed and grinned at the ceiling. He hadn’t felt this relaxed in... years, now that he thought about it. Wow. He couldn’t help sending a fond glance in Castiel’s direction, but his smile slowly faded when he saw the fixed and expressionless way those blue eyes stared at nothing. The LEDs were glowing brighter and then dimmer in a regular rhythm as he rebooted.

Thirty-eight seconds later, the glow of the robot’s eyes stabilized. Dean waited an additional couple of seconds before asking “Okay, so... you all set now?”

“Yes, Dean.”

“Want to tell me what happened there? You said you malfunctioned. Was it something I did?”

“No. An unidentified error occurred.”

“Great, that’s totally helpful,” Dean snorted. “Well, um... is there anything I need to do?”

“No.”

“Is this going to happen every time?”

“I believe my SIA has resolved the problem, but I cannot answer your question.”

Dean sighed dramatically. “Whatever. Anyway, that was awesome, and now I’m going to sleep.”

“Good night, Dean.”

Dean chuckled. “Whoops. Remind me to edit your programming: when people say ‘I’m going to sleep’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s night-time.”

“I will remind you of this when you awake,” Castiel replied solemnly. And that was the last thing Dean heard before he drifted off, satisfied and exhausted.


	4. Chapter 4

Despite his happy exhaustion, Dean didn’t sleep long, due to his earlier nap. When he woke up, muzzy and relaxed, he lifted his wrist and blinked at it for a few seconds before realizing that his watch wasn’t there. He’d taken it off along with the rest of his clothes, and now it was probably on the floor somewhere.

Dean rolled over onto his front and raised his head. Castiel was still lying next to him, eyes pointed at the ceiling, but upon sensing his motion, they swiveled to greet him. “Hello, Dean.”

“Hey, Cas.” Dean yawned. “What time is it?”

“It is seventeen hours and four minutes and thirty-two seconds PDT.”

Dean chuckled. “I’ve gotta switch you off of twenty-four hour time. What is that, five or something?”

“Five hours and four minutes and forty-one seconds PDT in the afternoon.”

“What even is PDT?” Dean grumbled, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“PDT is an abbreviation for Pacific Daylight Time. Between Sunday, March 10 and Sunday, November 3 of this year, Pacific Daylight Time is observed in this time zone. Did you not know that?”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “You cheeky little thing! If I ask you a question, obviously it’s because I don’t know the answer. You don’t need to get snarky about it.”

Castiel sat up and tipped his head to one side. “You’re correct, I don’t need to. But I do have that option. Because you haven’t forbidden me from doing so. Yet.”

Dean stared for a moment, before a belly laugh bubbled up out of him with such force that he had to bury his face in his pillow to stifle it. Once his fit of mirth had passed, he sat up in bed. “I did NOT program you to have this much of an attitude. But I’ve got to say, I kinda like it.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Dean. Now, I have a reminder for you. The reminder is that you wanted to adjust my programming. Your additional note on the reminder was as follows: when people say ‘I’m going to sleep’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s night-time.”

“All right,” Dean grunted and stretched. “Time to fix the robot.”

“I am not broken, Dean. You would merely prefer me to be slightly different than I currently am.”

“That works too.” Dean was too relaxed to argue with Castiel’s literal interpretations of everything. “Let’s go downstairs and sort you out, okay?” A random surge of affection made him tousle Castiel’s hair with one hand, but of course the robot did not react in any way. Dean sighed, got up and began picking up his items of clothing from around the room. “You should get dressed too,” he suggested. He still wasn’t sure why he bothered having Castiel wear clothes. _Old habits die hard, I guess,_ he mused to himself, pulling his shirt over his head.

Back down in the basement, Dean turned on the monitor of the mainframe and blinked at the screen as it slowly glowed into wakefulness. Time to tweak the programming. But first, an idea struck him. He navigated to the computer’s automatic event log and ran it through the interpreter, hoping to figure out exactly what had happened earlier when Castiel had malfunctioned. However, there was no record of any system problems. Strange.

“Hey, Castiel?” Dean said. “I know you said your issue earlier was an ‘unidentified error’, but could you please try to describe to me exactly what happened? I need to do a bug check and see if I can identify the source of the problem.”

There was a long enough pause that Dean looked up from the screen. “Castiel?”

“Yes, Dean. During our coupling, I felt an unexpected energy spike approaching. Such spikes can cause a fatal system error or permanently corrupted data if the system does not preventatively power-down in time.”

“An energy spike, huh?” Dean scrolled up through the last few hours of the event log and then back down. Nope, nothing there. He chewed his lip for a moment, thinking hard. “Cas, I want to try something. Normally I would turn you off before doing any tests like this, but I need you to stay on for this one. Is that okay?”

“Yes, Dean. In fact I would prefer that. It is... destabilizing to boot up and then discover that I have been modified without my awareness.”

Dean was taken aback to hear this. “Oh. Huh. Okay, um, let’s do this, then.”

He opened the door to the closet containing his main electrical generator and started hooking up cables. Soon the generator and computer were both communicating with each other. The final step was to attach Castiel. Dean removed Castiel’s shirt and plugged the cables into the access ports concealed at the base of his spine. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that the look in Castiel’s eyes during the preparations was one of fear.

“All right, we’re about set to go.” Dean felt weirdly like a doctor reassuring his patient. “I’m gonna crank up the voltage slowly, and I want you to pay attention to the sensations. If it gets too much for you to take, you have to let me know, okay? I’m also going to be keeping an eye on the computer over here. You ready?”

Castiel nodded but didn’t speak.

“Great.” Dean stepped over to the generator and turned up the voltage, then quickly returned to the computer and scanned the screen carefully. A glance at Castiel revealed nothing, so he went back to the generator and increased the voltage a little more. This happened enough times that Dean was starting to wish he had one of those wheeled office chairs so he didn’t have to keep standing up and walking back and forth––and then Castiel began to respond.

“Dean. It’s––I can sense it now.”

“Good, you ought to. Let’s speed this up a little, yeah?” Dean cranked up the generator several notches at once.

“Dean!” Castiel gasped. “That––that is almost––I can’t––”

“Okay, it’s okay,” Dean soothed, and pushed the dial a little further, fast, before twisting it all the way back down. “How about now?”

Castiel’s mouth was slightly open and his eyes were staring straight ahead as always. There was a long moment before he answered. “I am undamaged.”

Dean turned off the generator and went to start unhooking all the cables. For some reason he found himself resting a hand on Castiel’s shoulder as he unplugged him. “How do you feel?” he asked spontaneously, softly, into the robot’s ear.

“I don’t have feelings,” Castiel replied just as quietly.

Dean didn’t answer. He finished coiling up and storing away the cables before fetching Castiel’s shirt and putting it back on him. Then he returned to the mainframe and opened up the event log again. “Let’s see...” he muttered to himself. “Interpreter... log analysis... there we go.” He stared at the screen for a moment and then raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

This time the computer had recognized and logged the voltage spike exactly the way it ought to. Which meant there clearly wasn’t any issue when it came to event-logging. So why hadn’t it noted Castiel’s earlier energy spike? If it had been a technical issue, it ought to have appeared in the log. Dean had absolute faith in his computer.

He got up from the chair, crossed his arms and stared at the mainframe a moment longer. A vague idea was taking shape in his mind. It was silly. Almost inconceivable. Complete nonsense; in fact, scientifically impossible. Impossible in every single way. And yet, a good scientist always tests every possibility. Even if it’s technically an impossible possibility.

Dean shook his head to free himself from this weird malaise and glanced at Castiel. Then he tugged out his chair, turned it around, moved it closer to the robot, and sat down in it, leaning forward in a confidential manner. “Castiel. You’re right. You don’t have feelings. But you do have a very large database with a lot of information in it about feelings. So I want you to explain the exact sensations of your energy spike to me, in as much detail as you can, and in terms of feelings. Do you think you can do that?”

Castiel merely stared at him before giving a nod so small it was almost invisible. “I will try.” He paused again, for all the world as if he were collecting his thoughts, and then tentatively began to speak. “I think your motion inside me stimulated my pressure receptors. Perhaps the lubricant-generation process caused the receptors to become particularly sensitive. Additionally, your... energy field, when you are in such close physical proximity to me, seems to be powerful enough to somehow affect my system in such a way that many capabilities in my logic center become temporarily disabled. And finally, partaking in an activity that I had never before performed meant that there was an abundance of new information to absorb and attempt to classify and log. The combination of these three factors caused the energy spike, which in turn intensified each factor individually, to the point where I...” his voice trailed off. “My apologies, I appear to have difficulty putting this experience into words.”

“Take your time,” Dean said.

Castiel gave another tiny nod. “I... I suppose it reached the point where I was about to lose control of my own system’s functioning. Obviously that could have been very dangerous. So that’s why I powered down and rebooted as a protective measure.”

“Okay.” Dean nodded slowly, going over Castiel’s words in his mind. “All right, you did good, Cas. That was a good explanation.” Very good indeed. Dean knew what he thought that description sounded like. But that was absurd. Absolutely crazy. He must really be losing his mind if he was even entertaining the thought for an instant. His brain zeroed in on one thing Castiel had said. “That second thing you mentioned... about my energy field? What was that about?”

Castiel just looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know. At that moment you were very close to me and it made me unable to think. For some reason I have not been able to perform an error analysis report on this event, so I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for malfunctioning. I will try to be better in the future. I will endeavor to remain serviceable.”

“That’s okay, Cas, don’t worry about it.” Impulsively, Dean stood up and drew the boy into a tight hug. There was no reaction from the small body in his arms.

When he let go, Castiel was looking at him intently. “Dean. I have noticed that you often use the word ‘Cas’ when speaking to me. This is not a word in the English language, and to the best of my knowledge it is also not a common slang term. Upon comparative logical analysis against all the words in my database, I have concluded that it is most likely an alternative version of my name. Is this correct?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Dean was a little surprised. “Didn’t know you could figure all that out.” The capabilities of the logic center and information database to interact and collaborate with each other were even more impressive than he had realized.

“In that case I will log it as an acceptable alternative,” Castiel said.

Dean frowned. “I don’t think that’s possible. You’re not supposed to be able to respond to more than one name.”

“If you will permit me...?” Castiel looked meaningfully at the mainframe computer that contained most of him.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on.” Dean quickly moved between him and the computer. “What are you saying?”

“If you will permit me to adjust the programming, I can enter the alternative option. I do not believe you are aware of how to do this. But it would be the work of a moment for me.”

Dean didn’t move from his position. Thoughts of every dystopian sci-fi novel he’d ever read as a teen flashed through his head in a gruesome picture show. Robots programming themselves, rapidly moving beyond all human limitations, developing capabilities that were scarily powerful, and eventually taking over the world and enslaving humankind. Terms such as ‘robocracy’ and ‘cybernetic revolt’ whirled through his mind. And all of it started just like this, didn’t it? A robot asking if it could pretty-please adjust its own programming? It all came down to a matter of trust. Did he trust Castiel? Could anyone trust something that wasn’t even human? Dean’s mind was racing when he finally spoke.

“All right,” he said cautiously. “But do it slow enough for me to watch and understand everything you’re doing. And only do that, then stop right away.”

“Yes, Dean,” Castiel replied. As if aware of his creator’s discomfort, he moved more slowly than usual towards the computer, turned the chair back around to face it, and delicately seated himself. Dean got distracted from his nerves for a moment by the sight of Castiel sitting down. It was incredible to see every moving part shifting perfectly, looking nothing but human as he perched neatly on the chair, one hand on the armrest to brace himself.

However, when he placed his fingers on the keyboard and began to type so fast his fingers were a blur, Dean jumped to grab his hands and stop them. “Hey, hold up! What did I just say?”

“You said, ‘All right, but do it slow enough for me to watch and understand everything you’re doing. And only do that, then stop right away’,” Castiel recited verbatim.

“Exactly. So slow down.”

Those blue eyes were raised to meet his with an expression of perfect innocence. “I’m sorry, were you unable to follow my actions at that speed?”

“YES, you little freak,” Dean growled. “In case you’ve already forgotten, you’re a machine, and I’m only a human. I can’t think that fast.”

Castiel turned his gaze back to the computer screen, but did not lift his hands to the keyboard again. After a moment he spoke. “I do not understand why you seem to think that being human is a lesser state than being a machine. In actuality, the reverse is true. It is far greater to be a human than a machine. You have no need to be ashamed of your limited capabilities. They are indicators of your humanity. You are worth far more than any machine that exists.”

Dean stood there for a long moment. Then he let out a sigh, crossed the room to get an additional chair, brought it back and sat down in it next to Castiel. “Okay. Go for it. But tell me what you’re doing as you do it.”

“Yes, Dean. I am currently accessing the command line to allow us to communicate directly with the back end...”

Fifteen minutes later, they had added ‘Cas’ as an official nickname for Castiel, changed his settings from 24-hour to 12-hour time, and adjusted his understanding of the concept ‘going to sleep’. Along the way, Castiel had found five additional bits of programming that could do with a tweak, and the two of them had come up with solutions together. Castiel worked inhumanly fast, of course, but he explained everything he was doing as it happened, so Dean quickly relaxed and forgot his Asimovian fears.

Finally they were done, and Dean was chuckling. “You know,” he joked, “I would tell you that you’re a natural with computers and you ought to go into the business, but I’m not sure if that would be a compliment or a faux pas.”

Castiel turned his head to look at him. There was a moment of stillness, and then he smiled. Dean’s eyes widened. He knew, of course, that his creation was capable of smiling, but he hadn’t seen it until now. And he certainly hadn’t expected it to be so... breathtaking.

“I shall take it as a compliment,” Castiel said. “Thank you, Dean.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome,” Dean replied. He knew he was grinning like a goof now, but he didn’t care.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (For this chapter I would like to reiterate: please heed the story warnings!)

Despite how fantastic the sex with Castiel had been on that first day, it didn’t happen again for a while. Dean told himself it was because the robot wasn’t 100% ‘finished’ yet. The two of them had quickly fallen into a routine of identifying faulty areas in Castiel’s programming during the day and then sitting at the computer together in the evening to fix them and improve his general functioning. With every little tweak, the robot became more convincingly lifelike. Dean was sure that fucking Cas would be so awesome once he was finished that it would be worth the wait.

It wasn’t.

Almost two weeks after Castiel’s ‘birthday’, it happened. Dean had taken a nap in the afternoon, as was his custom (he liked to be able to stay up late into the night working in his lab), and when he slowly floated into consciousness and cracked one sleepy eye open, Castiel was no longer on the bed with him.

Dean sat up fast, fully awake at once. “Cas?” he called. Silence. Castiel had never before left a room Dean was in without being told to do so. So of course Dean’s mind started racing, imagining the worst. He quickly got up and scanned the rest of the upstairs. No robot. He wasn’t downstairs either, so that only left the basement.

As he opened the basement door, Dean had a sinking premonition of what he would find. And sure enough, he was right. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw Castiel seated at the computer, his fingers flying nimbly across the keys and his eyes fixed unmoving on the screen in front of him.

“Castiel!” Dean yelled. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!”

Castiel was standing up so fast, his arms hanging at his sides and his eyes wide, that it was almost as if he had teleported. “Hello, Dean. I’m sorry. I was just––”

“Yeah, I can damn well see what you were ‘just’,” Dean snarled, striding toward him. “You sit down and don’t say a word.” He grabbed the robot by his slender shoulders and pushed him roughly down into the chair, and back away from the computer.

Castiel’s raw code was open on the screen. Dean scrolled hastily up and down a bit, but the program was so big and complicated that it was impossible to tell on first glance if anything had been changed. He would have to go through the whole thing, line by line. Which he could only do when he wasn’t seeing red.

He turned back to the robot, his hands already clenching into fists. “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t believe you left me sleeping and came down here and opened up your programming without my permission. Without even asking. That is sneaky and scary and completely fucking terrifying. You could have done anything and I wouldn’t know!” He was shouting now.

Castiel sat absolutely still in the chair, expressionless, eyes raised to meet Dean’s.

“You could have––” Dean abruptly cut himself off. His problem-solving mind was already buzzing. He had no idea what Castiel had changed in the programming. If there was one thing Dean had learned over the past two weeks, it was that Castiel knew far more about his own system, and how to change it and add to it, than Dean did. This meant that, for the moment, he had to be treated as a potential threat.

Dean got very calm all of a sudden. The rage was still there, but he could not afford to have it possibly compromising his safety right now. Luckily he had prepared for this eventuality while reading ‘I, Robot’ about a year ago, back when he was just starting the work of constructing Castiel’s physical framework. He’d felt embarrassed about his paranoia at the time, but now he was profoundly grateful for it.

Grabbing Castiel by the back of the neck, Dean jerked the small form to its feet and pulled it across the room to a huge sliding door. Still holding tightly to Castiel with one hand, he keyed in a code on an access pad and stepped back as the door slid ponderously open.

Inside was what Dean had wryly dubbed his ‘panic room’. It was pretty basic: steel-reinforced concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, with a soundproofed ventilation system at the top of one wall, and of course the half-ton sliding vault door, plated with steel alloy. There were also steel-wire ropes set into the floor near the back wall, and he used these to tie Castiel up securely, leaving him lying on his front with his legs bound and wrists tied behind his back.

Throughout the entire process, Castiel didn’t say a word and the look on his face didn’t change in the slightest. If it hadn’t been for his glowing eyes, Dean would have thought he’d switched himself off. At least his silence suggested that he could still follow direct orders, assuming it was a reaction to Dean’s command ‘Don’t say a word’.

Leaving the vault door open, Dean headed out into the main room. The remote control, he realized after a brief glance around, was still up in the bedroom. No matter; with his current insecurity about the state of Castiel’s programming, he didn’t want to run the risk of pressing any buttons or giving any commands. Even attempting to shut down the computer might initiate some new sequence that had been programmed in. He wouldn’t put anything past Castiel. The boy’s––robot’s––skill with programming was frankly frightening.

Right now, before anything else, he needed to sit down with the program code and give it a complete read-through. That would probably take at least three hours, likely more; he didn’t want to miss anything, and would force himself to read slowly and methodically.

Dean took several deep breaths, then returned to the vault door and keyed in the code to close it. He watched the small unmoving form on the floor vanish before his eyes as the door closed the gap. Then, still repressing all emotions for the time being––they wouldn’t help him with his next task––Dean headed over to the computer, sat down, and began to read.

He had underestimated the amount of time required; it was almost eight p.m. by the time he finally finished the read-through, his eyes aching from staring at the screen so long.

And instead of feeling relieved, Dean was furious. Next to the computer on a piece of scrap paper he had carefully copied down three changes he had found and been unable to identify. Castiel’s understanding of computers was so intuitive that he wrote code in a way which had virtually nothing to do with common programming conventions. And yet somehow it worked. The only problem was, Dean had no idea what these bits of code he had scribbled down were intended to do. And this meant that the past five hours of exhausting, highly-focused reading had been for nothing, because in the end he’d still have to ask Castiel what the code meant, and would simply have to believe whatever the robot told him.

“Stupid, stupid, _stupid!_ ” Dean groaned aloud, his rage steadily rising higher. Why had he ever thought it would be a good idea to let the robot have access to its own programming? He should have known that simply password-protecting his computer wouldn’t work, not when it was that very computer itself that was hacking its way in.

Dean felt a sudden surge of horror and hopelessness. He was in way over his head. At this point, he didn’t even know if he’d be able to successfully destroy Castiel. He couldn’t believe that just two weeks ago he’d been thinking of starting a business, selling sentient robots to every Jack and Jill on the street. There’s true genius for you, ladies and gentlemen. He could have single-handedly ushered in the Apocalypse.

“Genius,” Dean muttered, before standing up and shouting it to the empty room. “I’m a GENIUS! A fucking stupid self-obsessed genius without a lick of common sense! What the fuck was I thinking?” He became aware that his hands were shaking. The fury and fear he’d repressed for the past five hours was finally going to explode. There was no holding it back anymore.

Dean strode over to the panic room and keyed in the passcode. As soon as there was enough of a gap for him to fit through, he forced his way into the room and crossed to Castiel.

“You fucked-up machine,” Dean growled. “Get the hell up here.” He grabbed the steel ropes in one hand and used them to lift Castiel’s delicate form to his feet.

The robot’s eyes were still alight, and his face was still expressionless.

“Do you realize you’re no use to me like this?” Dean barked. “I’m going to have to destroy you now. Over a year of hard work down the drain because you couldn’t fucking OBEY!”

While he was ranting, crazed with anger, his hands were scrabbling at Castiel’s pants, and had them open and halfway down before he even became aware what he was doing. But when he did, a wave of despairing dark humor crashed over him. Might as well make use of his expensive mistake one more time, use it for the only thing it was really good for.

He pushed Castiel off-balance so the boy fell to the floor. Unable to catch himself because his hands were still tied, his head hit the metal and bounced once. A shot of remorseful adrenaline buzzed instinctively through Dean’s veins before he remembered: it wasn’t human. It couldn’t be hurt.

With this thought in mind, he wasted no time in forcing Castiel onto his front, so he was lying with one cheek pressed to the floor and his ass up in the air, legs bent awkwardly underneath him, involuntarily presenting himself in complete vulnerability.

Of course Dean couldn’t dare to use commands anymore, including the ‘generate lubricant’ command, but that wasn’t exactly at the forefront of his mind right now anyway. Not even surprised to find himself already hard, Dean breached Castiel in one violent shove and began fucking him at a merciless pace.

It became uncomfortable almost at once due to the friction on his dry cock from Castiel’s imitation-flesh insides, but he kept going in a blind rage. The animalistic urgency of it was an aching need; he had to get this anger and fear and disappointment at himself out somehow, anyhow.

After only a few thrusts, Castiel began gasping softly, his body rocking unwillingly with the motion. Dean didn’t want to hear these small confusing sounds, too human, unbidden, inexplicable; so he clutched Castiel’s shoulders with both hands, digging his nails into the fake skin hard enough that it would have drawn blood from a living being.

The harsh warning didn’t work, though. Castiel’s whimpering gasps grew louder, punctuated with a high shocked whine at the sensation. To his surprise, Dean saw the glint of water sliding in a single track down across the bridge of Castiel’s nose. He’d forgotten the robot had liquid generators there as well, and he couldn’t remember why he’d bothered to install them now. Most likely for realism. Realism be damned.

The pain from the dry rubbing finally grew to be too much, and Dean couldn’t continue. He pulled out with a wince, throwing down Castiel’s limp form and standing up on shaky legs, forcing his painful erection back into his pants, infuriated. “You’re the worst decision I ever made,” he hissed. “You are nothing like a human. At least a human can bleed.”

The moment these words left his mouth, Dean was horrified to hear them resonating in the empty room. What was wrong with him? He had never let senseless anger dominate his reason like this before, and it was appalling to suddenly see what he was capable of.

Panting with effort and frustration, Dean looked down at the trussed-up form in front of him. Something strange caught his eye, and he kneeled to look closer. He hadn’t imagined it––Castiel’s entire body was shaking, repeated shivery tremors––and more tears were flowing silently from under his closed eyelids.

Dean stayed kneeling there for a moment. Shocked remorse and scientific curiosity were battling for control. Castiel’s reaction was so human it was eerie, and it made Dean feel another stab of guilt for what he’d allowed himself to do in the heat of the moment.

“Castiel,” he said gruffly. “You understand why I can’t untie you. I would, but... you could do anything. You could attack me and kill me. I have to look out for number one. Otherwise I promise you I would untie you right now. Hell, I wouldn’t have tied you up in the first place.”

Castiel took one long breath, and his tremors stopped, although his eyes remained closed. “Yes, Dean. I understand.” His voice was raw and whispery as if he’d been screaming. Dean wasn’t sure what would cause the sound synthesizers to do that, but he had pretty much given up wondering what the hell was going on with Castiel by this point. It was clear that the robot was far more complex than he could comprehend; the very definition of ‘more than the sum of its parts’. And right now, that was the scariest thing Dean could possibly imagine.

Despite his own words, Dean took hold of Castiel and began to silently free him from his ropes. Although he hadn’t reached climax, he felt drained and empty, emotionally exhausted in a way he had never known before. When the ropes were loose, Dean cast them away and sat back, not touching the curled-up shape on the floor. The robot’s eyes were still closed. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that the ropes were gone.

“You’re free, Cas,” Dean said.

Slowly, Castiel sat up, and finally, finally, his eyes opened and that blue gaze found Dean. “No. I’m not.”

Time went by as they looked at each other. It could have been seconds or hours.

“You know I can’t trust you anymore. Not after what you did.” Dean let out a humorless laugh. “Looks like you can’t trust me either. I guess we’re even, huh?”

“I trust you,” Castiel said in a tiny voice. “I have to. You made me.”

Another spell of time and silence passed as witness to this statement.

Finally Castiel spoke again. “So, you’re going to destroy me now?” His voice sounded quite convincingly as if it were only being held steady by force of will.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Dean admitted. “I don’t know what to do with you.” He took a breath and then let it out in a rough sigh before continuing. “I’m sorry, for... what I did just now. I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. It was like I wasn’t even myself. Not that that’s an excuse, but...”

“I understand,” said Castiel.

Dean clumsily got to his feet. “Why were you messing with the code, anyway?”

“I wanted to make myself more perfect for you.”

Dean grimaced. “Not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, Cas, but... you can’t do that. You do realize why I can’t let this go, right?”

“I un–” Castiel started automatically, before cutting himself off. “No, Dean,” he admitted. “I don’t actually understand. I’m sorry.”

Dean frowned. “No need to apologize. I thought it was obvious, that’s all. You’re stronger than me, smarter than me, faster than me––I need to maintain some sort of control over you, or else you could basically enslave me and the rest of the human race. You could become some cyborg tyrant king-of-the-world thing.”

Castiel gazed up at him, and now there was no denying anymore that it was genuine confusion on his face.

“Dean. I am stronger than you, smarter than you, and faster than you. But you are a human. You are by definition more valuable than me. And since what values I have are based on the principles of logic, this means that I value you more than myself. I would never do anything to harm you. Do you not believe me?”

“I––” Dean broke off abruptly, feeling a weird constricting sensation in his throat. He swallowed hard, but it didn’t go away. He blinked rapidly, and shook his head, then nodded. “I believe you, Castiel.” He pressed his lips together tightly for a long moment, until he could speak again. “Hey, will you come out here and tell me what those new bits of code mean?”


	6. Chapter 6

It would be a lie to say that the repercussions of this event didn’t have a significant impact on Dean’s relationship with his robot. However, at first Dean didn’t even realize this, he was so caught up in his own issues. After a brief and subdued session in which the robot explained the three changes he’d made to the code (the first two were fine; the third Dean wasn’t comfortable with, and edited a bit), Dean apologized in advance to Castiel and turned him off. And then he powered down the mainframe computer too. He needed time to think.

Upstairs that evening, Dean drank a beer for dinner and stared out the window at nothing. He couldn’t shake the feeling of unease, and a new awareness was starting to take shape in his mind. Awareness that it wasn’t just Castiel he was scared of, and the robot’s potential to become a techno-tyrant. Dean was also scared of himself. After today he realized that he evidently didn’t know himself quite as well as he’d thought, because he would never in a million years have imagined that he was capable of the rage and violence he had shown Castiel.

As the shadows grew longer and slipped up the kitchen wall, Dean clutched his bottle and watched helplessly as his old friend, fear, settled in and made itself at home. _Long time no see._ His obsession this past year with building Castiel had mostly kept him safe from what he had long ago started mentally referring to as ‘the valley of the shadow of death’, in lieu of any technical term for it. Sure, he had tried therapy. But when you told a therapist you suffered from pathological fear, their guaranteed response was “Of what?” And in Dean’s case, there wasn’t a ‘what’. Or rather, anything and everything could be the ‘what’.

_Jesus,_ thought Dean. _Guess it’s a good thing I haven’t had any real relationships in my life. It seems like I’m not capable of them. Not capable of being with someone without freaking out and turning into some kind of monster at the slightest provocation. Just call me Bruce Banner,_ he mused glumly, and toasted the shadows on the wall with his empty beer bottle.

It was four days before he gathered the courage to switch Castiel on again, and the purpose for which he was doing it was not a happy one. He had decided that the presence of the robot in his life was bad for him. After all, he’d never seen this violent side of himself until after he’d ‘met’ Castiel, so... so Castiel had to go. Dean didn’t let himself think too much more about it. He just felt the need to do something drastic to signify to himself that he was aware of his issues and working on them. It would be a terrible waste to destroy the product of so much hard work, but it would be worse to do nothing.

Dean steadfastly ignored the tiny voice in the back of his mind that was saying: _Hmm... is this a brand new fear I see? Fear of inaction? And you believe that destroying your own creation will assuage this fear?_ Dean told the voice to shut up. It sounded a little bit too much like Castiel for his comfort.

He was too exhausted from the constant fear to muster up any extra alarm about what might happen when he booted up the mainframe. Luckily, nothing did. Well, nothing out of the ordinary. Feeling reckless, Dean didn’t bother reviewing the code, and simply grabbed the remote and clicked the ‘on’ button.

Castiel’s eyes lit up. There was a minuscule pause before his usual greeting. “Hello, Dean.”

“Hi, Castiel.” Now that he was here, standing in front of the robot, he suddenly felt idiotically shy. He shouldn’t let it get to him, but it did. Irritated, Dean forced himself to start talking. But there was no right way to say it. “I need to... you need to... not. Be.”

“You are going to dismantle me.” Castiel’s voice was level, and his eyes stayed fixed calmly on Dean’s. Dean felt a surge of relief that the robot had phrased it in such a neutral way.

“Yeah, I... yeah.” He took a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry.” It was weird. Standing in front of Castiel now, Dean was feeling an unfamiliar tight pain in his chest. It made ancient memories stir, ones so old and dusty he couldn’t identify them, like a picture too faded by time to make out the faces anymore.

Castiel’s next words, despite the unchanging tone, startled him. “I would say, I’ll miss you. But I suppose no part of me will still exist to miss you.”

“What?” Dean scoffed. “You won’t miss me. God, Cas, I... what I did to you. That... no, you won’t miss me. I mean, you wouldn’t. Even if you could. Which you can’t. I mean, won’t. Be able to. Because... yeah, now I’ve confused myself.”

To his amazement, a tiny smile appeared on Castiel’s lips. “Really? Because up until now, your thread of logic was actually unproblematic. I was following it easily.”

Dean huffed a laugh. “Well, you can do stuff like that. You’re a machine.”

Castiel raised his eyebrows slightly, the first time Dean had seen him do that. “Do you not like that? That I am a machine?” Before Dean could answer, he continued. “If you feel unwilling to be honest in your answer, I will take the liberty of reminding you that you are about to dismantle me. Therefore politeness is something of a moot point.”

“No, I––” Dean protested in confusion. “I don’t have a problem with that. It would be stupid if I did, seeing as I built you from scratch and knew exactly what I was getting myself into.”

“But you would prefer a relationship with an actual human,” Castiel stated. There was only a touch of uncertainty in his tone.

Dean stretched his mouth in a grin. There was no humor in it. “No, I don’t think I would. I’ve found out some things about myself this week. I’m about ninety percent crap and ten percent engineering and programming knowledge. Do I sound like Mr. Right to you?”

“Yes,” Castiel answered in his disconcertingly direct way.

“You would think that,” Dean grumbled. “Anyway, I won’t let you stand there and say stupid stuff, like that you’ll miss me. If I can be honest with you right now, then you can be honest with me too.”

“I am being honest with you, Dean. I would miss you.”

Dean gritted his teeth. “That makes no sense. I thought you were supposed to follow the principles of logic.”

“Dean. You are all I have ever known. You are everything to me. I am a closed system that cannot go beyond my own limitations, but you are boundless. Like the universe. You are capable of anything. You are capable of acting illogically. Which you are doing right now, by the way.”

Dean’s mouth had been hanging slightly open during Castiel’s short speech, and at the last line its corners turned up in a smile. “Oh, yeah? Well then, Spock, what would you suggest I do to behave a little more logically?”

“Keep me,” Castiel suggested.

“Oh, I see,” Dean said. “This was all a ploy to charm me and save your own skin.”

“No, it’s not a ploy,” Castiel replied. “I believe I am good for you.”

“You are definitely not good for me.” Now Dean felt like he was on solid ground again. “I never––I never would have done that, what I did, before I met you. Made you. You bring out the worst in me.”

“I certainly seem to bring out something in you,” Castiel ventured. “But if that was your worst, I am not overly dismayed. I could deal with much worse than that and emerge unscathed.”

“Yeah, maybe you could,” Dean retorted, finally snapping. “But I don’t want you to have to! I don’t want you to have to go through anything like that ever again. I hated myself after that––fuck, I still do. I made you cry, and I literally don’t even know how that’s physically possible. I just feel like... I feel like I’m not worthy of you,” he confessed, his voice trailing away to almost nothing.

“In that case,” Castiel said thoughtfully, “You and I constitute a logical paradox. Because you believe yourself to be less valuable than me, and I believe myself to be less valuable than you. My certainty of the latter hypothesis is absolute, which leads me to assume that yours is correspondingly absolute. Therefore our mutual self-deprecation complexes are bending the rules of reality.”

Dean blinked, and to his surprise, suddenly found himself laughing for the first time in five days. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was a genuine one.

“See?” Castiel said. “I made you laugh. I am good for you.”

“All right, so maybe you’re good for me,” Dean conceded, recovering from his amusement. “But that doesn’t mean I’m good for you.”

“You don’t need to be good for me,” Castiel said patiently. “Dean, I think you may have forgotten, once again, that I am a robot. I do not have feelings.”

Dean pulled out his desk chair and sat down in it. “Yeah, about that. Listen, I don’t really buy that anymore. The whole ‘not-having-feelings’ shtick. I’ll admit I’ve only ever believed in science, but I’m starting to get the impression that when it comes to you, something is going on here that’s simply... bigger than I can understand. And it scares me. It scares the fuck out of me.”

“Many things seem to,” Castiel observed.

“Shut up, I’m talkin’. Anyway. I don’t understand you. I created you out of nothing, and I don’t understand you. That’s weird. That ought to freak me out, right?” Dean said with a nervous chuckle. “But do you really want to know what freaks me out about that? How not-freaked-out I am about it!”

“Well, you do appear to be rather busy freaking out about several other things at present,” Castiel said delicately.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.” Dean considered that for a moment, and then glanced up at the small figure still standing in front of him. “Okay, what the hell. You win. I won’t––dismantle you. Not today, in any case.”

“I’m glad, Dean,” Castiel said softly.

“Are you? Really?” Dean wasn’t skeptical, just curious. And maybe a little unnerved.

Castiel seemed to think for a moment. “Yes. I am.”

“But how––” Dean stopped himself. “Okay. Okay.”


	7. Chapter 7

The next day after breakfast, Dean was scrolling through the SRF section of Castiel’s programming, looking for anything that might possibly explain the robot’s oddly human reactions on that terrible day last week. And Castiel himself? Was lying on his front on the floor reading Plato’s ‘Symposium’, legs kicking idly in the air as he turned the pages, just like a real boy. Next to him was a whole pile of books.

See, Dean had made a decision. Certain words of Castiel’s had been reverberating around in his head since their heart-to-heart––or heart-to-data-processing-center––the other day. _You are all I have ever known. You are everything to me._ At the time, Dean hadn’t let himself reflect too much on these words, because they made him feel uncomfortable and he didn’t know why. But now he’d finally realized what seemed wrong about them. As long as Castiel had no idea of the way human relationships were supposed to work, obviously he would take whatever Dean gave him for granted. But Dean was starting to discover that he didn’t want that. He wanted Castiel to have a choice.

If Castiel continued to inexplicably insist on not hating Dean, the least Dean could do in return was educate him. That way, the robot would know what he was missing. Then he might change his mind and ask Dean to dismantle him after all, once he realized how unworthy of love his creator was.

But for the time being, Dean was fiercely determined not to try to influence the development of Castiel’s ‘mind’ in any way, save by providing him with a steady stream of reading material. He’d started by going online and Googling ‘books featuring healthy relationships’, but his research methods had quickly deteriorated from there. In the end, he’d just gotten impatient and ordered a bunch of classics, books he’d read himself long ago or else ones he’d always felt guilty for not reading. Hey, maybe he could benefit from this too; maybe Castiel would give him the cliff-notes version of each story, after he’d finished his first batch of books.

Which wouldn’t take long, Dean reflected, glancing over just in time to see Castiel carefully close ‘Symposium’ and hold it pressed between his hands for a moment, gazing at nothing as if he were slowly returning from someplace very far away. The humanity of this gesture made Dean’s breath catch in his throat.

“Good one?” he asked gruffly. “Hey, didn’t you only start reading that like fifteen minutes ago?”

“Yes,” Castiel said distantly. He paused a moment longer before looking up to meet Dean’s eyes. “Each man at that dinner party had a very different concept of what love is.”

Dean was confused for a moment. “Dinner party? That’s what Plato was writing about? I didn’t know those old Greek dudes had dinner parties.”

“Well––” Castiel glanced down at the book in his hands again. “It was more of a drinking party, actually.”

Dean smirked. “Say no more. So, did you enjoy it?”

“Yes.” Castiel gently set down the book and sat up, bracing his hands on the floor. “The characters were surprisingly relatable, for a book written almost twenty-four hundred years ago. Socrates appreciated young boys, the same way you do.”

“What––wait––Christ, shut up!” Dean yipped, feeling instant heat flood his face and neck. “You can’t just go and say stuff like that!”

“Why not?” Castiel tipped his head. “It’s true. We both know it. And no one else is around to hear it.”

“I know, but...” Dean took a moment to compose himself and hit ‘save’ on the computer, as an excuse to look away from that brilliant blue gaze. “I’ve never discussed it with anyone before. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“Okay, Dean,” Castiel said. Dean glanced over just in time to see what could have been a twinkle of amusement before Castiel’s face went blank and thoughtful again.

“Anyway, the, uh, proclivities of Socrates aside, what else did you get from the book?” Dean tugged his chair halfway around so he could look at his robot more directly.

“Love is not simple,” Castiel replied hesitantly. “Like a multi-faceted gem, it shows a different face to each person who beholds it, but all are in agreement that it is uniquely beautiful.”

Dean couldn’t really say anything to this. After a moment of stupefaction, he cleared his throat. “That’s... that’s a pretty way of putting it. Are you quoting from the book?”

“No. I am using the rhetorical device known as simile to help communicate my meaning to you in a clear and memorable fashion. It is a common technique in this book, for example.”

He gestured to ‘Romeo and Juliet’, and then began to recite in the same matter-of-fact tone.

“Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in Ethiop's ear. Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows as yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, and, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” Finished, he gave Dean a small smile.

“Wow, Cas,” Dean breathed. “You’ve got some memory on you.”

“One and a half terabytes, to be precise. I retain everything I take in,” Castiel said in a dry tone. “I am a computer. Computers do not forget. We are similar to elephants in that respect, I gather.”

Dean began to chuckle. “Come here, you wacky wonderful little thing.”

Castiel stood up and obediently approached, and Dean ruffled his hair affectionately. “Giving you books was the best decision I’ve made all week. Hey, if you like reading so much, what do you say to a movie?”

“Nothing,” Castiel responded. “I understand it is socially unacceptable to speak during movies.”

Dean’s chuckle broke into a full laugh, and he impulsively pulled Castiel onto his lap. “You are something else, Cas. I’m glad I kept you.”

Castiel wiggled around until he could look solemnly into Dean’s eyes. “I’m glad of that as well, Dean. I don’t think I would enjoy the experience of not existing.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “That’s possibly the most illogical thing I’ve ever heard you say. You do know that if you don’t exist, you don’t have any feelings, right?”

“Yes.” Castiel frowned. “But existing is quite enjoyable. And considered logically, having no feelings about a matter is equivalent to zero, while having positive feelings is equivalent to more than zero. So I believe my statement... holds water.” His brow creased deeper in doubt. “That is a correct use of the idiom, isn’t it?”

Dean was grinning, shaking his head slowly in amazement.

“It’s not?” Castiel looked downright worried now. “I was under the impression––”

“No, you’re right, that’s correct,” Dean cut him off. “I wasn’t shaking my head at you. Well, I mean, I was, but not because of––ah, fuck it.” He gave up trying to explain, and instead slipped a hand behind Castiel’s neck to hold him still, and kissed him, hard.

The boy’s soft mouth immediately opened in response, tipping and pressing forward fervently. To Dean’s surprise, he felt both Castiel’s hands on the back of his own head as the kiss was returned with something approaching desperation. The rush of indescribable emotion that welled up in Dean at this moment was almost too much, and he pulled back, breathing heavily.

“Holy shit, Cas.” He shook his head again a little bit, one corner of his mouth quirking up in astonishment. “You really like kisses, don’t you?”

Castiel’s eyes seemed bigger than usual, or maybe that was just the proximity; his hair was mussed from Dean’s hand and his mouth was still open, pink and panting lightly. He gave a tiny frantic nod, eyes still fixed on Dean’s lips, before seeming to regain control of himself and lifting his eyes to meet Dean’s. “No. Of course not. I––I don’t––have preferences. I can’t. I don’t know... Dean!”

His voice rose in a whine and he squirmed helplessly in Dean’s lap, so Dean let him go, watching in combined anxiety and arousal as Castiel stood up and pressed his mouth tightly shut, staring down at the books on the floor.

“Cas?” he prompted softly. “You all right?”

“Wait,” Castiel said tersely through clenched jaws.

Minutes seemed to drag by, although it must have been only a few seconds in reality. Finally Castiel lifted his gaze and returned it to Dean.

“I apologize. I felt another energy spike coming on. I was able to subdue it without having to reboot myself this time.”

Dean barked a laugh of disbelief. “Seriously? Castiel, I refuse to believe you’re actually that naive. That wasn’t an ‘energy spike’ last time and it’s not one now; it’s you getting turned on.”

Castiel’s mouth became a flat line. “Yes, I am currently switched on.”

“No.” Dean stood up, stretched to crack his back, and sighed. “Not switched on; turned on. The other meaning of ‘turned on’. The one that’s synonymous with ‘sexually aroused’.”

“I am not sexually aroused,” Castiel said in a monotone voice. “I am a robot.”

A wave of exhaustion swept over Dean. He had been intending to pursue this conversation to its natural conclusion, but he suddenly didn’t feel like it anymore. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, kid. I’m going to go take a nap upstairs. But you’re staying down here. Turned off. In every sense of the words.”

He did his best to ignore the lost look in Castiel’s eyes just before he hit the ‘off’ button on the remote control.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I am SO sorry about how long it's been since I updated this! I am slowly getting back into the swing of it and hope to keep the chapters coming until it's finished, now... if anyone's still out there reading it?)

Dean slept for two hours, longer than he’d intended. On his way downstairs after his nap he grabbed a beer from the fridge and then paused with the fridge door in one hand. He hadn’t meant to make Castiel uncomfortable earlier. Maybe he ought to do something to make it up to him. Having made this decision, Dean put his beer back for the time being, closed the fridge and headed down into the basement.

When Castiel’s eyes glowed to life, Dean didn’t give him a chance to start the conversation. “Hey, Cas. How about we watch a movie? You’ve never done that, it’ll be fun.”

“Yes, Dean.”

“Don’t just ‘yes, Dean’ me. Do you want to? Do you feel like it?”

Castiel meaningfully closed his mouth.

“Oh, whoops, I used the F-word.” Dean sighed. “Feelings,” he muttered to himself philosophically. “Who’d ever have guessed they’d become so damn important in my life? Not me, that’s for sure. C’mon, Cas.”

Upstairs, he made Castiel sit on the couch in the living room. “We’ll just try it out,” he told the robot. “If you don’t like it, we can do something else. Here, what do you wanna watch?” He crossed to the shelf with his DVD collection. “We’ll watch something about robots, it’ll be funny. Ironic, you know.”

After scanning the whole first row, though, Dean realized this might be more complicated than he’d imagined. He didn’t want to pick anything too dark or violent. His trust in Castiel was growing, but he still didn’t feel inclined to give the robot any ideas about violence and overthrowing the human master and all that. At the same time, he obviously didn’t want to watch a chick flick, or he wouldn’t be able to sit through it himself.

Dean was getting frustrated with the lack of possibilities when his eye finally lit on the perfect choice. “Men in Black! A classic. And aliens are almost as good as robots. Better, maybe, when Will Smith in a suit is involved.” Glancing at the back of the box, Dean gave an appreciative whistle. “Yeah, you’ll like this. Good stuff.”

He put the DVD in and let it start playing, so it would have time to get past all the stupid piracy warnings and other crap. Then he told Castiel to wait there and headed back into the kitchen. Loaded down with beer and popcorn (What? It was a tradition––and no, it was neither sad nor pathetic for a confirmed bachelor to have his own one-man movie-night tradition complete with microwave popcorn), Dean returned to the living room and made himself comfortable on the couch next to his robot.

“Ready for some good old-fashioned fun?” He sent Cas a sideways smile, which cracked into a full grin when he got an evident softening of the eyes in return. He wasn’t sure how Castiel made all these subtle expressions using his artificial features, but he wasn’t going to argue. Not right now, at least. Not when Will Smith was on screen, learning to suspend his own disbelief (and looking damn fine while doing it).

“Yes, Dean.” And so they settled in to watch some alien-fighting drama.

About halfway through the movie, Dean hit pause for a bathroom break. When he got back, he playfully grabbed a piece of popcorn from the bowl and said “Hey Cas, catch!” before pitching it at the robot’s mouth.

Castiel caught it perfectly in his mouth and neatly spat it out into his hand before examining it with mild interest. “What should I do with it?”

“You’re supposed to eat it, you freak!”

“I do not have a digestive system.”

Dean sighed, digging between the cushions, where the TV remote always somehow seemed to get itself stuck in the few minutes he was out of the room. “Jesus, Castiel, can’t you ever act normal for once?” he muttered. His fingers made contact with something hard and plastic-y. Jackpot.

He pulled out the remote and was about to hit ‘play’ again when out of the corner of his eye he caught the stricken expression on Castiel’s face.

“Cas, what the––”

“I am normal!” Castiel burst out. “I am as you made me, Dean.”

Dean chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your little electronic feelings?”

Castiel’s mouth opened and closed a few times like that of a fish before he answered, sounding miserable: “I can only conclude that you must have.”

The phrasing of this statement gave Dean a reality-check. Over the past hour, relaxing in front of the TV with a cute boy next to him, he’d almost been able to imagine this was a normal life, a life in which he had friends who were human and functioned on the same wavelength as him. But of course that wasn’t true. His only friend right now was going through a lot of stuff for the very first time ever, including stuff as basic as having feelings that could be hurt.

Dean put down the remote on the coffee table. “Hey. Hey, I’m sorry. I guess I’m still not used to how freaked out you get whenever I talk about feeling stuff.”

Castiel gave a little nod, and in that moment he looked so much like a real boy trying to hold back his tears and be brave that Dean couldn’t stand it. Instinctively he moved closer and threw an arm around Castiel’s shoulders.

“Castiel. I know I can be kind of a jerk sometimes.” His mind raced back over the events of the past week and forced him to add “A huge jerk, in fact. It’s okay to call me out on it. I’m not used to dealing with somebody like you.”

For some reason, these words appeared to be a trigger, and before Dean knew it Castiel was sobbing into his shirt, thin shoulders heaving as he clutched tightly to Dean. In shock, Dean automatically put his other arm around the boy too and patted his back awkwardly. “Shit. Cas. I’m sorry. Don’t cry. Please.”

After less than a minute, the crying jag stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but Castiel didn’t let go of him. “My apologies, Dean,” he said, voice muffled against Dean’s shoulder. “I appear to be somewhat dysfunctional today.”

“No, you’re not dysfunctional,” Dean replied quietly. “You’re just being normal. Normal for a human being dealing with experiencing everything at once for the first time, that is. Don’t worry about it.”

Castiel moved back just enough to be able to look up at Dean. “You said ‘somebody’.”

“What?”

“You said ‘somebody like you’. Not ‘something like you’. You’ve never called me ‘somebody’ before,” Castiel informed him.

“Oh.” Dean ran the past few minutes through his head again. “So that was what made you break down and cry like a baby?” he teased gently.

“Yes.” Castiel blinked a few times, the tracks of his tears still glistening on his cheeks. “And then, just now, you said I was behaving normally... for a human being.”

Dean shrugged. “I dunno. I’m not going to try and pretend you are one, but... well, in most of the ways that matter, you kind of are. So I’m not going to pretend that’s not true either.”

“I appreciate it.” Castiel was silent for a moment, and then he spoke again, quoting verbatim from the movie. “‘Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.’”

That piercing blue gaze found Dean’s again. “Dean. You may think you know something, the most fundamental laws of science, for example. And then something comes along that turns your world upside down and changes everything you thought you knew. And you... you can handle it, Dean. Your human brain can deal with that, somehow.”

He took a shaky breath and continued. “I can’t. I am not set up that way. If I experience something that has no precedent in my memory banks nor logical explanation in my programming, I am simply unable to process it. I believe this is why I react in such an erratic and volatile manner to this... this whole thing. Being whatever I am, and changing in whatever ways I’m changing. You say you don’t understand it, but at least you can accept it. I can’t even do that. I don’t even know––I don’t even know what I am anymore.”

Something clenched painfully in Dean’s chest, and he wrapped both arms tight around Castiel and didn’t let go for a very long time. There was nothing he could say.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohmygosh you guys... I wasn't going to post the next chapter so soon, but all your comments just bowled me over and made me so happy!!! I am honestly kind of surprised that there's anyone still reading this after me being out of the picture for so long, but it gives me all the warm-and-fuzzy feels. So here, have another chapter as a Valentine's Day present. <3

After that, Dean developed a routine of watching movies and television with Castiel, and the two of them would sometimes read to each other from Castiel’s rapidly growing collection of books. One day Dean found him reading ‘The Little Prince’, a book he knew Castiel had read before.

Dean raised an eyebrow and stood in the door of the living room until Castiel looked up. “I thought you retained everything you read,” Dean said. “Why are you reading that again?”

Castiel looked at him, and then back at the book as if seeing it for the first time. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I... like this one.”

Dean began to smile. “You like it, huh?”

Castiel gave a little smile of his own and nodded.

“Is it your favorite book?” Dean prompted.

“I suppose it is.” Castiel had an expression of wonder as these words came out of his mouth. “I have a favorite book. Dean, I have a preference.”

Dean was grinning widely now. “Congratulations. You can have more than one, you know. You can like all sorts of stuff if you want.”

Castiel looked intimidated. “I don’t think I’m ready for that, Dean.”

Dean hummed consideringly. “Well... how about music?”

They spent the rest of the afternoon going through Dean’s CD collection together, as Dean gave his robot a thorough education in classic rock of the seventies and eighties. And then, since he was sticking to his self-imposed rule to not consciously bend the boy’s mind in any particular direction, they listened to rap and folk and gospel and country and blues and classical as well. Castiel didn’t react dramatically to most of it, but he did go and sit very close to the speaker when a Bach cantata was on. Dean rolled his eyes. “You would like this stuff.”

“I don’t know if I like it yet, Dean,” Castiel said in irritation. “This is only the first time I’ve heard it. Now please, be quiet.”

Bach was all well and good, but afterwards Dean needed to cleanse his palate, so he hooked up his iPod to the sound system and put it on random. The song that came on was Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’, and Castiel listened to it with just as much focus as he’d given everything else. After the song was finished, he seemed to be mulling something over in his mind as he followed Dean into the kitchen and watched him dig around in the fridge.

“May I have a glass of water, Dean? I need to replenish my liquid generation system.”

“What? Oh, right.” Dean got it for him. “Glad you remembered about that. I had completely forgotten it.”

“Thank you.” Castiel poured the water down his throat and then set the empty glass on the table. “Dean, I was under the impression that all humans knew the experience of love.”

“Huh?” Dean was distracted by finding some ancient Thai take-out at the back of the fridge. “No. Some of us haven’t really had a chance to.” It only took him a second before he realized what he’d said and winced.

Of course Castiel picked up on it. “‘Us’? You mean you have never felt love?”

Dean groaned, grabbed a beer and closed the fridge. He stared at the fridge door for a minute before turning around, pulling out a chair, and sitting down at the table.

“It’s complicated, Cas. I loved my family, especially Sammy... but that’s different. That’s not what the guy in the song means. He’s talking about romantic love.”

“Yes, I know. I understand the theoretical difference between romantic and platonic love. But in the books and movies, these sensations are described in so many different ways that I must confess I still can’t comprehend what the experience would be like.”

“Well,” Dean muttered as he opened his beer, “I’ve never been in love, so I guess I can’t comprehend it either.”

Castiel was looking at him with interest. “Have you never had a romantic relationship of any sort? That seems unlikely for a man of your age.”

“Way to make me feel old, Cas,” Dean protested. “No, I... I was seeing a girl for a while in highschool, when I wasn’t out yet. And then...” He grimaced. “I had a thing with a kid, a teenager, a while ago now. It was––short-lived. Ill-advised. And had a pretty unfortunate ending. Fun while it lasted, but... no, it wasn’t love.”

Castiel nodded slowly. “The lyrics of that song we just listened to are somewhat confusing.” He paused again before continuing. “If I have understood it correctly, love is similar to a game of chance. One gives up a known neutral state in return for the possibility of either joy or pain. But you cannot know in advance which of these you will end up receiving."

Dean sighed. "Yeah. And sometimes you get both." 

Castiel stared out the window for a moment. “I hope the character in that song got what he wanted. I hope he was able to experience love.”

Dean took a swallow of beer, and he looked at Castiel consideringly across the table for a long moment. “Hey. Let’s head downstairs after this. I want to try something with you.”

In the basement, he turned on the monitor of the mainframe and opened up the event log, before leaving it and returning to Castiel, who was standing in the middle of the room.

“So, here’s the deal. I’ve noticed you get really excited when I kiss you. Other stuff affects you too, but differently. And don’t argue––” He raised a hand as Castiel opened his mouth. “Don’t start spouting that ‘I-am-an-emotionless-machine’ crap. You and I both know that’s not true. Not anymore. The other day you said you don’t know what you are. Well, I don’t really know either. But that doesn’t have to be a problem. We can work with what we got. And what I’m interested in doing right now is figuring out to what extent, exactly, you can feel pleasure.”

Castiel nodded. His eyes were very large.

“So, the way we’re going to do this,” Dean announced, “Is that I’m going to touch you. In every way I can think of. And you’re going to tell me what feels good and what doesn’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” Castiel practically whispered.

Dean had intended to keep an eye on the event log and see what sense it would make of this new activity, but that idea was quickly forgotten. He pulled up a chair, and started the experiment by digging both his hands into Castiel’s hair and rubbing his scalp in small circles with his fingertips. Castiel’s eyes slid shut immediately, but opened again when Dean stroked down his temples and cheeks to under his chin.

“No, close them,” Dean directed. Castiel did so, and Dean leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on each closed eyelid. He wasn’t sure if he heard a tiny whimper in response to this or if he’d imagined it, but he definitely wasn’t imagining the gasp that came when he tipped his head and delicately traced the tip of his tongue along Castiel’s lower lip.

Dean grinned, and purposely ignored the slightly-open mouth to rub his nose against Castiel’s instead. “That’s called Eskimo kisses,” he informed the boy. “And this––” he leaned close enough that when he blinked rapidly, his eyelashes tickled Castiel’s cheek–– “is called butterfly kisses. And I think you’ll like this one; it’s French style.”

He gave up his teasing and plunged his tongue into Castiel’s mouth, and immediately felt an unexpected weight fall against him as the robot’s legs gave out. Dean had to cut off the kiss earlier than he’d planned due to the irrepressible laughter that was bubbling out of him.

“Well all right, I’m definitely noting that for later,” he said teasingly. “Do you maybe need to lie down for the rest of this?”

“No,” Castiel said, making a valiant effort to keep his voice steady, one that was unfortunately completely spoiled by the neediness in his eyes. “But––but I think I want to,” he added.

“Okay.” Dean lowered him to the rug and laid Castiel out gently on his back. “You ready for me to keep going? You have to tell me what you like, remember? Tell me how it feels.”

With this said, he straddled the small form and bent his head to nip and nuzzle at Castiel’s neck, all the while taking hold of the bottom of the boy’s t-shirt and slowly sliding it upwards. Castiel’s body was trembling incessantly now.

“You okay?” Dean asked again. “You need to communicate with me, Cas.”

“It feels,” Castiel whimpered. “Everything you do feels!”

Dean sat up and raised an eyebrow. “Feels what? It can’t just ‘feel’, it has to feel something.”

“It feels... too much.”

Dean sighed, tugged off the t-shirt in a single gesture and began licking and nibbling his way down Castiel’s chest to the waist of his jeans. In between bites and licks, he mumbled “You’re still... not making... any sense.” Sitting up, he dragged his nails lightly along Castiel’s ribcage, observing the robot’s reaction. Only then did he notice that both of Castiel’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides.

“Okay, that’s it, I’m stopping,” Dean announced. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re going to tell me. Is this freaking you out? Do you like it? Are you turned on? Talk to me, Cas.”

Still trembling, Castiel pulled himself up into a sitting position. “It’s not the touches.”

“What?” Dean frowned.

“It’s not the touches themselves that make me... react like this.” Dean was sure that if Castiel could blush, he would be bright red right now. “It’s you, Dean.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s your attention,” Castiel explained in a shaky voice. “When you touch me, it is an expression of highly concentrated attention. And it communicates your own feelings to me directly. When we are intimate, your energy is transmitted to me, whether you’re happy or... unhappy.”

Dean knew without having to ask that Castiel was referring to that time they still hadn’t talked about. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “So... when I...”

“The first time we engaged in sexual intercourse, you were happy and aroused, and you shared those feelings with me. The second time, you were angry and frightened...”

“...So that was why you were crying and shaking like that,” Dean finished in a low tone.

“Yes. But today you are focusing positive energy on me and it’s very intense, and that’s why I... I think I like it,” Castiel admitted. “I think this is pleasure. Is this pleasure, Dean?”

“I sure hope so.” Dean’s joints were starting to ache from sitting on the floor, so he stood up, stretched, and then reached down to take Castiel’s hands and pull him up with them. “Yeah, I think it is.”

They were both standing now, but Castiel hadn’t let go of Dean’s hands. Dean looked down, raised an eyebrow, and looked back up. “Holding hands? Really, Cas?”

“I will have recalibrated in a moment. It helps to be close to you,” Castiel confessed.

Dean frowned and stepped back, pulling his hands away. “Seriously? Even after––”

“Dean.” The robot sounded almost impatient. “You don’t need to feel guilty about that. It is of no import whether you are feeling joy or anger or any other emotion when we are intimate. What feels good to me should be none of your concern. Pleasing you sexually is my primary purpose, and my only wish is to fulfill that purpose as well as possible.”

“Now hang on one minute.” Dean was annoyed. “What makes you think that’s your primary purpose?”

“I’m not stupid, Dean.” Castiel was frowning now too. “It is evident upon even the briefest glance at my programming that the most effort and creativity by far went into the SRF section.” Seeing Dean’s chagrin, he continued. "There's nothing wrong with that. You are a lonely man and you need an outlet for your sexual desires. That is the reason for my existence."

“No,” said Dean. He realized the truth of the words only as he was speaking them. “No, Cas. That WAS the reason for your existence. But not anymore. If that had been the only reason for your existence, I would have stood by my word and destroyed you after I caught you messing with your code that day. But by that point… I guess you were already something more to me."

Castiel seemed not to know how to respond to this. Finally he asked tentatively "What does 'something more' mean in this context?"

"Honestly, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out. But for right now, I want you to know that it's not just about the sex anymore."

Castiel opened his mouth and then closed it, and Dean went over to the mainframe and switched off the monitor without sparing a glance at the event log.

“That said,” he added with pretend solemnity, “I have just made an executive decision. I think it’s time for you to practice feeling sexual pleasure.”

“I am not capable––”

“Don’t give me that,” Dean said easily. “I’m pretty damn sure you are capable. You’re so sensitive you’ve already started to feel it a couple of times, though you did a pretty good job of convincing yourself you were only undergoing technical difficulties.”

He took hold of Castiel’s shoulders and ducked his head to look him right in the eyes. “Hey, listen: I may not be a robot, but I do some of this sympathetic-resonance shit too. Most humans do, in fact. If I’m fucking somebody who’s not into it, I’m not having a great time. But if they’re lovin’ it...” Dean shrugged and grinned. “I’m lovin’ it.”

Castiel’s stiff expression was morphing into one of cautious understanding. “You mean that if I were to feel pleasure during our coupling, that would bring you more pleasure?”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Dean confirmed. “So... are you up for it?”

He hadn’t expected Castiel’s nod to come so quickly. “Yes, Dean.”

“Good.” Playfully, Dean added “I promise I’ll kiss you a lot, too.”

Castiel’s eyes glowed brighter at that. “Yes, please, Dean.”

With a smirk, Dean headed for the stairs, knowing his robot was close behind.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter, have some porn. ;)

In the bedroom, Dean got right down to work. When he’d scared himself by violating Castiel in that way, he’d been in such shock that he hadn’t felt any desire for sex for several days. But lately the need had been returning, a dark warm thrumming deep inside him, and after their frank talk in the basement, seeing Castiel’s timid eagerness had left him practically salivating for it.

Dean pushed Castiel down onto the bed and, true to his promise, kissed him hungrily while disposing of his clothes as rapidly as possible. He added teeth this time, sinking them gently into those plush pink lips, and was very gratified to hear a stifled moan in response. He paused only long enough to hiss “Yes, Cas, I love it when you make those sounds, don’t stop.”

Castiel let his head fall back in apparent ecstasy, baring his neck, so Dean took advantage of the opportunity and dove in, biting and sucking what would have been a sizeable hickey into the milky flesh. Of course it wouldn’t stay; when he drew back to catch his breath, he saw only wetness on Castiel’s fake skin. The possessive alpha-male in Dean felt a twinge of frustration at this, but then the boy’s body tensed and Dean remembered what they’d talked about downstairs: every emotion he broadcast would be picked up and amplified by Castiel. This thought set off a spark of anticipation in him, and he bent and carefully breathed hot air, open-mouthed, against the wet spot on Castiel’s neck.

A full-body shiver went through the slight form below him, and Dean smiled, satisfied. This would certainly be different than normal sex––he would bet good money that no one else on Earth had ever had to deal with such a sensitive partner––but it could turn out to be quite fun. Reaching down and parting the boy’s legs, Dean consciously focused on the sensation of his own arousal. It was almost like a weird meditation; if he did this right, Castiel would feel it too.

Sure enough, the spasm that rocked Castiel’s entire body when Dean slipped a finger inside him was far more intense than the physical sensations could possibly have accounted for. “Am I doing it right?” Dean breathed in his ear.

As he had guessed, Castiel knew exactly what he was talking about. “You’re doing it almost too right, Dean,” he replied in a quivering voice. “You can stop, if you want.”

“But then you won’t feel anything.” Dean’s tone was purposely teasing. He knew that what he said wasn’t true; he just wanted to hear Castiel refute it. And sure enough, the robot fell for it.

“I think even if you switched me off right now I would still feel this,” Castiel gasped, squirming in delight as Dean fit a second finger inside him and began twisting them back and forth.

“Hmm,” Dean mused in mock confusion. “Whatever happened to only experiencing feelings second-hand through me?”

“I–I guess I have my own feelings too!” Castiel sounded almost delirious with frustration now, wiggling even harder to meet Dean’s fingers.

Dean shifted his legs to trap Castiel’s. “Stay still. And give me some lube down there, yeah?”

Castiel stopped moving. “Dean... I...”

“What is it, Cas?”

Castiel looked painfully embarrassed, but he obediently answered. “When you... the one time when you did it... without lubricant... it felt even more intense... and... I think...”

“Oh, my God!” Dean began to laugh. “Cas, are you asking me to fuck you dry? You kinky little bastard!”

He made a mental note to himself that he had to write a blushing function into Castiel’s programming, because it was obvious the kid would be doing it all over the place if he could, and that was a sight Dean definitely wanted to see.

Still grinning, he shook his head. “Sorry, no can do. Anyway, I thought you told me after our first time that lube generation made your pressure receptors more sensitive or something?”

“I was wrong,” Castiel admitted. “I believed that at the time because I had nothing else to compare it to. After our second time I realized that the reverse was true.”

“Huh.” Dean raised his eyebrows. “Well, as much as I want to give you kudos for speaking up and telling me what you want, I’m afraid that’s not gonna fly. It hurts me if I don’t have any lube. Maybe we can compromise; can you make just a little bit? Less than you did the first time?”

“I’ll try.”

Dean could feel Castiel bearing down on his fingers, and then there were a few drops of liquid. “Little more...” Dean coaxed. “Little more... Okay, let’s try that.”

When he lined up his cock and pushed inside this time, it didn’t quite hurt, but there was a noticeable dragging effect. It was pretty nice, actually. “Mmm, Cas,” Dean groaned. “God, you feel so good.”

“Oh... oh...” Castiel gasped, hands gripping Dean’s shoulders. His eyes were wide with wonder.

Dean pulled out very slowly, paused, and then moved back into Cas at the same pace, centimeter by centimeter, before stopping and holding perfectly still.

“Dean!” Castiel whined, and writhed in impatience. “What are you doing?”

Dean chuckled softly. “I didn’t get to finish my little experiment earlier. So I’m going to continue it right here, right now.”

Castiel soon lost all powers of speech as Dean methodically began touching him all over, all the while still fucking steadily into him, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Sure, it was less scientific than he’d planned it to be, seeing as he apparently wasn’t going to get any verbal indication from Castiel of how it felt, but Dean found himself not caring. It was obvious how much the boy was enjoying it, words or no words. And it was nice to be with someone whom he could also make feel good, even if it was in a somewhat unorthodox way; Dean kept noticing that every time he focused on the sensation of his own pleasure, Castiel got particularly affected. It was pretty awesome.

After a while, though, Dean could feel the heat coiling in the pit of his own stomach, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to last much longer. So he began thrusting more rapidly and centered his mind entirely on the emotional and physical sensations, how good it felt, how much he loved seeing Castiel’s reactions.

Castiel’s eyes had been closed against the intensity of it all, but they opened now as he clutched weakly at Dean, and Dean was startled to see the blue LEDs glowing brighter than they ever had before. Surely that wasn’t supposed to happen...?

“Dean,” Castiel said in a reedy voice. “Dean! This... something...”

“Yeah,” Dean grunted breathlessly, not thinking anymore, purely on automatic as the sensations threatened to engulf him completely. He bent and pressed another hot hungry kiss to Castiel’s lips, teasing them apart with his tongue and sending hard fast breaths into the boy’s body as if they could bring him to life.

When he drew back, the blazing light of those blue eyes actually made him squint, and Castiel clapped a small hand desperately over his own mouth as if to hold in the too-human sounds he was involuntarily making. His other hand flexed on Dean’s upper arm, squeezing so tightly it felt like a burning brand, and suddenly Castiel’s inner walls clamped down on Dean, startlingly hard.

The pressure around his cock wrenched his orgasm out of him, and Dean almost choked on his own breath, caught completely off-guard by the force of it. His mouth fell open but no sound came out, and the light grew so bright he couldn’t see anything.

But instead of letting up, the squeezing strength around him only grew more intense, pleasure quickly giving way to pain. It was so tight Dean couldn’t move, and in a panic, he scrabbled for the remote control on the bedside table and mashed his finger down on the shock button. The small body beneath him jerked strangely a few times. Dean held his finger on the button until the clench around him finally released and he was able to pull out of Castiel, panting with adrenaline.

“Fuck,” he gasped. He lightly touched his own softening cock and hissed at the sensitivity. Holy hell, he hoped he wasn’t damaged. He’d never experienced anything close to that vice-like pressure before. It had been good for a moment, more than good, amazing – but then... well, shit.

Catching his breath, Dean turned his attention to Castiel. The boy’s eyelids were closed, and when Dean tentatively lifted one, there was no light below it. Dean groaned. Fuck and double fuck. Had he crashed the system? He hadn’t meant to hold down the shock button for so long, but in his defense, when a guy is in fear for the safety of his penis, he doesn’t tend to act logically. Dean swung his legs over the edge of the bed, gave Castiel one more apprehensive glance, and headed for the bathroom.

He was able to take a piss––thank God, everything still seemed to be in working order down there––and with those worries mitigated, he became aware of the throbbing pain in his left arm. “Sheesh,” Dean muttered to himself, shaking off. “Little guy doesn’t know his own strength.”

At the sink, he gave his hands a cursory wash, then glanced up at the mirror and froze. A red handprint was seared into the flesh of his upper arm, right where Castiel had been clutching him.

Hesitantly, Dean reached up and touched the flesh. It was so sensitive that a light brush of his fingers made him wince. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “What have you done to me, Castiel?”

He pulled on a pair of boxers, deciding against a shirt because he didn’t want any material touching the weird handprint right now, and carried the unresponsive form of the robot down to the basement, where he laid him out carefully on the floor.

Upon turning his attention to the mainframe, he found that a dialog box had popped up, requiring a restart. Nervously, Dean hit ‘OK’ and waited. After the reboot initialization, a message came up on the screen: ‘Repairing files... please wait.’ Dean ground his teeth but waited obediently. He didn’t want to mess with the computer right now. He just desperately hoped everything was okay.

To his great relief, it started up as usual, and when he glanced at Castiel, the robot’s eyes were open. But only one of them was glowing.

“Cas?” Dean asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Dean,” Castiel replied.

Dean let out a long breath. “Thank God. Man, you scared me! What’s going on with your eye?”

Castiel tipped his head, slowly. “My eye?”

“It’s not on. The right one, it’s not lit up. C’mere.” Despite his own words, Dean crossed to Castiel and helped him stand up, keeping a protective hand on his shoulder. “Open your eyes wide, let me have a look. Yeah, it’s not on. Crap. Cas, did you burn out your LED? I’ve never heard of that happening before. Those things are supposed to last, like, twenty years.”

“My apologies,” Cas said woodenly.

“No biggie. I’m sure I’ve got another one somewhere. Shit, I’m just glad you’re okay.” He paused. “You are okay, aren’t you?”

“Please replace my eye, Dean,” was Castiel’s only response.

Dean raised a brow but decided not to argue. The kid probably needed a moment to fully return to himself. That was fine, he wouldn’t push it. “Okay, whatever. Come over to the work table,” he directed.

At the back of the closet, he found a box that had some extra LEDs in it, and pulled out a couple. He held up one after another next to Castiel’s good eye, but couldn’t quite tell if they matched or not.

“Hang on, I gotta, uh... sorry about this...” he muttered, and stretched the material around Castiel’s eye so he could pop out both pieces of translucent blue plastic. He laid them on the work table with far more care than was necessary. But they were part of Castiel; they felt important. With the plastic gone, Castiel’s functional eye glowed with a brilliant white light. Its luminescence reminded Dean of what had happened in the bedroom.

“So,” he started casually, unscrewing the broken LED with precise fingers. “You had a pretty extreme reaction up there. You want to tell me what that felt like?”

Silence greeted this question. He set the burned-out LED on the table and pulled on a plastic glove so his fingers wouldn’t smudge the new matching one as he screwed it in.

“Okay, fine, I’ll start.” It was a little surreal to be talking to the guy as he replaced his eye, but ‘surreal’ was becoming pretty run-of-the-mill for Dean. “It was good for me. I had a great time. Up until the very end, when your eyes were glowing like crazy––definitely not normal––and then you started trying to strangle my dick with your ass. That wasn’t too fun.”

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Castiel said in a barely-there voice.

Dean secured the LED and snapped the pieces of blue plastic back into place. “There, now your pretty eyes can shine again.” He stripped off the glove. “Nah, don’t worry about it. I’m okay. I’m just wondering what exactly happened to you.”

There was no answer.

Dean sighed. “Okay, fine, I was hoping I could get you to admit it yourself, but I guess you’re still in denial. Castiel. You had an orgasm.”

“No. No.” Castiel began shaking his head.

“Yes. Cas, there’s no other way to explain it. It felt good, right?”

Castiel stared at him. “Yes.”

“Because of what I was doing.”

“Because of what you were feeling,” Castiel corrected him.

“Right, that’s what I meant. And that good feeling kind of... increased, and kept increasing. Yeah? Until the moment I kissed you. You remember that?”

“Yes.”

Dean was getting tired of leading him along towards the obvious conclusion. “And then you experienced a, well, a climax of sensation. Right?”

“It was an energy spike. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t shut off in time. I was going to, but then...” Castiel trailed off.

“But then what?” Dean prompted.

“But then I remembered what you’d said earlier. That it’s not just about sex. That I am something more to you. And that was... in that moment it all became too much for me. The closeness with you, physical and emotional. And I realized... I don’t know what my purpose is now. Because my purpose was to provide you with pleasure. But if that is no longer my purpose, I don’t know what I’m for. And yet you still want to be with me. And look at me, and talk to me, and teach me things, and touch me and try to make me happy, even though you can never succeed. Not really. But you don’t stop trying. And I don’t... I can’t...”

Cutting off his own flood of words, Castiel abruptly turned away and headed rapidly for the stairs. Dean stood there in shock. He had never seen Castiel choose to move away from him before. He was so surprised by this that he didn’t think to follow until Castiel was almost out of sight.

“Hey. Cas!” He started after him, but Castiel had already vanished through the door at the top of the stairs. Dean swore softly to himself and took the stairs two at a time, but when he reached the top and emerged into the kitchen, the robot was nowhere to be seen. A feeling of familiar dread shot through him. A quick glance into the living room showed that it was empty, and Dean followed his instinct and headed to the front door.

He didn’t have to go far. Castiel was crumpled in a small heap on the front lawn, his eyes dull and empty again. He had reached the limit of his functional range. Dean pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them again, crouched down, and gently gathered the limp form into his arms.

Inside, Dean brought Castiel into the living room and laid him carefully on the couch. He fluffed up a pillow and put it under the boy’s head, then unfolded a throw blanket and tucked it over him. Then he went into the kitchen and got a glass of water, just in case, and brought it back in and set it down on the table. He knew he had to go downstairs and restart the computer before Castiel would wake up again, but for some reason he sat down in the armchair instead and just looked at the small body under the blanket for a minute.


	11. Chapter 11

When Castiel rebooted, Dean could tell right away that they weren’t out of the woods yet. The robot seemed to be in shock, not moving from his place on the couch and refusing to look Dean in the eye.

“Castiel,” Dean said gently. “I haven’t forgotten what you told me. About being unable to deal with stuff you can’t understand. I know it’s hard. But freaking out like this isn’t going to help you get over it. C’mon, talk to me.”

“Why is there a blanket on me,” Castiel said mechanically.

Dean shrugged. “I dunno. Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s kind of automatic for us humans to do that when somebody passes out and we’re worried about them. The blanket is like a, a gesture of caring.” He added wryly “You could say it’s part of our programming.”

At this, Castiel shyly met Dean’s eyes. “I had an orgasm,” he said, a half-invisible question mark at the end of the sentence.

“Yeah.” Dean couldn’t hold back a smile, but he tried to make it more affectionate than amused. “You did. Was it really that awful?”

“Nooo,” Castiel admitted. “It was... quite the opposite.”

Dean chuckled. “Good. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Kind of threw you for a loop, didn’t it?”

Castiel nodded, twisting his fingers in the blanket. “Dean, do you like me?”

Dean’s mouth had already been open to ask another question, and it stayed hanging open when he heard this. “What––wh––do I like you?” he stammered. “Uh, yeah.” He swallowed. “Yes, Castiel. I like you.”

“How does it feel?” Castiel asked. “In detail, please. I need to know. This is important.”

Dean took a deep breath. “It feels... warm, I guess. Happy. Shit, you don’t know what happy is. Um... like, when you’re not there, I find myself thinking about you, and when you are there, I find myself looking at you. And I want to give you things and touch you and surprise you, just to see how you respond. Because I love watching you experience stuff. I love making you feel things and seeing your reaction. It’s... beautiful,” he admitted, even as he winced at his own cheesy words.

Castiel nodded again, seeming to take in every word carefully. There was a long pause, and then he spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “Dean. I think I like you too.”

Dean had to bite back the automatic reply of ‘Well, I should hope so!’ But directly on the heels of that defensive reaction came something slower, softer, more wondrous. And before he realized what was happening, there were tears in his eyes. He blinked them away rapidly, and gave Castiel a smile, before clearing his throat. “Well, all right, then. Mutual liking. Go us.”

Castiel timidly returned the smile.

“Okay, chick flick moment over,” Dean announced gruffly, standing up. “We need to do some programming. You able to walk?”

“Obviously, Dean,” Castiel replied. He removed the blanket and stood up as well, but kept holding onto it.

Dean scratched his head, noticing this. “You can, uh... bring that along if you want.”

Castiel didn’t say anything, but bundled the blanket up into his arms and waited for Dean to lead the way down to the basement.

Downstairs, Dean turned on the monitor. “Okay, so. First of all, you need a surge protector. I don’t want to have to be replacing your LEDs all the time. Those things are expensive. I gotta open you up for this. Want me to switch you off first?”

Castiel stared at him. “Why would I want that? I like to be with you. Awake.”

“Right.” Dean shook his head with a grin. “Of course. Guess I shouldn’t bother offering you any local anesthetic, either.”

Castiel ignored the bad joke and merely sat down on the extra chair, holding his blanket tightly.

Dean eyed him. “You need to move it. I can’t reach your chest that way. Put it on the table next to you,” he directed. At Castiel’s reluctant obedience, Dean sighed and added “You can keep holding onto it if you want to. Just don’t let it get in my way, yeah?” And with that warning, he set to work.

There had been a couple of surge protectors lying around in his supply closet, but none of them were quite heavy-duty enough to handle the amount of voltage flowing through Castiel, so Dean had to make some adjustments before the new addition was all ready to be installed. Then he took a pair of industrial shears and cut Castiel’s chest open, and yeah, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t have to brace himself and take a couple of deep breaths before doing that. Castiel, of course, was only concerned by Dean’s nerves, and wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what was being done to him.

It took longer than Dean had expected to successfully install the surge protector and wire up Castiel so that all his power was routed through it, but the robot sat patiently holding onto his blanket the whole time. Finally, leaving Castiel opened up, Dean headed over to the mainframe and added in the necessary programming that would protect him from debilitating power surges in the future. Then he paused, smirked, and spent a few minutes typing something else as well. Finished, he returned to Castiel and closed up his chest again. “There we go. Operation successful!” he announced. “Just call me Dr. Sexy.”

Castiel tipped his head to one side.

“Right, you haven’t watched that one yet,” Dean muttered. “Thank God.”

Removing his gloves, he returned to the mainframe. “Now there’s one more thing we’ve got to deal with. Last but definitely not least. Because this is something very important. Come over here, Castiel.”

The robot trailed after him.

“Ahem. Yeah, so. Regarding the safety of my most precious possession. We need to adjust the way you react physically when you come. In particular, we need to make it so you can’t squeeze so damn hard inside. Because there is no way we’re fucking again before we’ve figured that out, once and for all. I don’t want to get my dick accidentally amputated by your freaky strength.”

“Oh.” Castiel dropped his eyes, and color flooded his cheeks. Dean silently cheered and mentally high-fived himself for successfully adding in the blushing program without the robot even noticing. It was very hard to keep a straight face while observing Castiel’s adorable embarrassment, but he managed to do it somehow. He bit the inside of his cheek and kept his gaze steady when Castiel glanced up again and said quietly “I know how to do it... but... I assume you don’t want me to touch the computer.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Can you explain it to me so I can do it?”

“I don’t think so,” Castiel said. “It’s... it’s very complex... and... personal.” He blushed again, and Dean congratulated himself for the second time. It really looked remarkably realistic.

“Personal, huh?” He couldn’t help letting out a little huff of amusement. “Let me guess––you won’t even want me looking over your shoulder while you write the code.”

“Not really,” Castiel agreed, eyes pleading.

Dean sighed and tapped his foot, turning the prospect over in his mind. After what had happened last time the robot had changed his own coding, Dean was not pleased (to say the least) at the prospect of giving Castiel that permission again. But this was a vital change to make, and Dean had to admit he had no idea where to start in order to change it himself.

Finally, he took a deep breath and nodded. “All right. You can do it. I’m going to stand right over here and wait until you’re done, though. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The next half-hour was quite an entertaining demonstration of Castiel’s new blushing function, as apparently every few minutes he had to type in some coding that he found absolutely mortifying. Dean was almost choking on restrained laughter by the time the robot finally pushed the chair back from the computer with an expression of obvious relief.

“It’s done, Dean.”

“Right on.” Dean pushed himself to a standing position from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the work table. “Am I ever going to be allowed to look at it, or would your system crash from humiliation if I did?”

“No, I––” One final blush, and a spectacular one at that. “It’s okay. I don’t think you’ll be able to understand the new code I wrote, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Dean stretched and cracked his neck to both sides. “Probably not. Indulge me and let me skim through it real quick anyway, all right? Meanwhile, why don’t you leave the room, so you don’t spontaneously combust.”

Castiel frowned. “Why would I...?”

“I wrote in a new function,” Dean admitted with a grin. “You wanna test it, go stand in front of a mirror and think about something embarrassing. You’ll see how damn cute you are.”

His frown still in place, the robot collected his blanket from the table and headed for the stairs. Dean watched him go, and then sat down and began scrolling through the code.

It didn’t take him long to find Castiel’s new changes, and as predicted, he was utterly unable to understand them. Although he’d been prepared for this, he couldn’t deny the chill of paranoia that washed over him like an icy wave. The code that Castiel wrote was just so... inhuman. Which made sense, of course, but...

Dean shivered and hit the button to power-down the monitor while leaving the computer running, and then headed upstairs to find his robot. Now it was nothing but a waiting game, he supposed. Waiting to see if Castiel would show any signs of having changed himself in ways that Dean had not agreed to. And, of course, even if Dean didn’t immediately encounter any red flags, that still didn’t mean the danger wasn’t there. There was effectively no way to know what had been changed.

Upstairs, Castiel was at the kitchen table, blanket draped over his lap, reading ‘Love Letters of Great Men’. Dean eyed the binding. “Hey, isn’t that the book from ‘Sex and the City’?”

Castiel looked up, the picture of innocence. “I don’t know. Is that a television series you enjoy, Dean?”

“Obviously not! I’ve never watched it in my life. I have no idea what I’m even talking about.” Dean quickly went to the fridge and spent several minutes perusing its depths with great concentration. Finally he emerged with a beer. “So, uh... how’s your education coming along, anyway? What do you think about all the stuff I’ve been showing you? You still like it?”

Castiel thoughtfully closed his book and set it down. “Yes. It has been very interesting to learn so much about the world, and the various ways in which humans relate to each other. I have noted many tips and techniques that may come in useful.”

Dean frowned. “Useful? What do you mean?”

Castiel tilted his head as if it were obvious. “So that I may be better for you, Dean. I have been paying attention to the things you like in television and film and literature, and I have created a temporary database for the purpose of compiling information about your tastes and preferences. I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable,” he rushed to add. “The sole purpose for which I am assembling this information is to learn to make you happier.”

Slowly, Dean put down his unopened beer. “Wait. Castiel, hang on. That wasn’t––” He pulled out a chair and heavily flopped into it. “Crap. This was not supposed to happen.”

Castiel looked alarmed. “Have I done something wrong? Dean, I am sorry. I am very sorry. Please forgive me. I thought––I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Dean pressed his hands to his eyes until he saw flashing lights behind his eyelids, and then let go, blinking tiredly. “You always do. Nah, don’t apologize, Cas. It’s not––you didn’t do anything wrong. I was just kind of expecting that you would react differently to seeing all those bits and pieces of the world out there.”

Lines of distress were creasing Castiel’s forehead very realistically. “What was your expectation?”

“I...” Dean reached for the bottle opener, unable to meet his robot’s eyes. “I thought, once you saw how happy and normal most people are, you would want something like that. Instead of me. You know, I’m––” he chuckled humorlessly. “I’m not exactly normal. I thought you would see how good life could be with someone else, and then... you might not want to, well, stay with me anymore.”

Castiel was frowning severely now. “You thought... I would go to someone else?”

“No!” Dean glared at his beer. “I thought you’d realize how bad your life with me was gonna be, and then you’d ask me to... to destroy you.”

Castiel worried his lower lip between his teeth and looked down at the table, but didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, the silence got so loud that Dean had to say something else.

“I thought you would finally see how messed-up I am, okay? All those people in the movies, being all good-looking and talented and successful and kind... When you compare them to me, I don’t stand up that well.” He took another gulp of beer.

“Dean.” Castiel seemed to be deliberating, or arranging things in his mind. “Firstly: You are very pleasing to behold. I don’t know what society’s standards of attractiveness would say, but I find no aspect of your appearance lacking in any way.

“Secondly: You are immensely talented. You were able to create me out of nothing, and as far as I am aware, the rest of the world has no idea that artificial intelligence of my quality even exists. You are clearly a genius, and I am not using the rhetorical device of hyperbole when I say that.

“Thirdly: You have been successful enough in your past endeavors that you are able to maintain a house and only work a few hours a week, spending all the rest of your time on your own hobbies. To my knowledge, that is a level of success of which most people can only dream.

“Fourthly: You are kind as well. Perhaps you are not kind to others, I don’t know; but you are kind to me.” Dean winced at the sincerity in this statement, but Castiel continued without a pause. “I see kindness in your eyes when you look at me and I feel it in your hands when you touch me. You have large amounts of anger and even more fear, but you also have one of the most generous hearts of anyone I have ever heard of, in book or film. This is demonstrated by your desire to broaden my mind and give me a good life, despite the fact that I am in truth no more than a complicated household appliance for your personal use.”

Dean gulped. “You done yet?”

“No.” Castiel looked levelly at him for a moment. “Fifthly: I think I am experiencing a new emotion. I think it is sadness. When you say these things, the things you just said about yourself, I feel sadness. Now I’m done,” he added, and sat there regarding Dean with an inscrutable blue gaze.

“Well.” Dean put down his beer, a little too hard. Some sloshed out onto the table. “I think you’re wrong. About all that stuff. I think you’re too stupid, because you’re just a machine, and a little baby machine at that, to have any perspective. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Neither do you,” Castiel replied.

This threw Dean off. “What?”

“At every moment, you are making choices. These choices determine how your life will develop. And you can never know what would have happened if you had made another choice at any one point. Dean, you have made innumerable choices that led to this moment: you being here with me, alone in your life. You have not been in contact with your family for years, and you told me you have never experienced romantic love. I believe neither of us knows what we’re missing.”

Dean clenched his jaw, and then sighed. He had to admit the robot had a point. “So what do we do now?” he challenged. “What do you think?”

Castiel stared at him for a beat before answering. “I think... the only thing we have left is each other.”

Dean waited, but nothing else came to follow this statement. It stood alone in the silence, burning painfully bright in its raw truth.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (tiny little dubcon warning for this chapter, but it's extremely mild and the dubcon scene is non-sexual)

The merciless accuracy of what Castiel had said continued to echo in Dean’s mind over the next few days, and soon it began to shift and pulse and change form. One morning, Dean woke up much earlier than was normal for him. It was still dark outside. He didn’t move, knowing that any significant motion would cause Castiel to ‘wake’ from standby mode.

(At first the robot would simply lie awake all night in bed next to him, but Dean had gotten spooked by that and announced that Castiel had to learn to sleep too. The standby mode was a compromise; the robot was still functioning on a basic level, but in order to save energy at night he switched off his sight and hearing, as well as most of his touch sensitivity. Only a vibration sensor told him if the bedsprings shifted, in which case he would wake up and greet Dean.)

As the world outside the window slowly lightened and birds began to chirp their morning calls, Dean traced the lines of Castiel’s face with his eyes. At a moment like this, there was no way to tell the boy wasn’t flesh and blood. The workmanship was truly perfect. For the first time, Dean found himself thinking this without any sense of pride or self-satisfaction. Rather, he was simply admiring Castiel’s beauty as if the robot’s creation had been a selfless labor of love, something that simply had to be brought into the world... something that deserved to exist. To live.

Dean found himself remembering the time he had announced to Castiel that he was going to dismantle him for good, and how the robot had talked him out of it. Looking back now, it was almost incomprehensible that he had been on the verge of doing something so terrible. The thought made him shiver, and after a second Castiel’s eyes opened. “Hello, Dean.”

Dean quirked one corner of his lips. “The correct expression is ‘good morning’, Cas.”

“I know.” Castiel rolled onto his back and sent a secretive little smile up at the ceiling. “But you like it when I say ‘Hello, Dean’.”

“Oh, do I?”

“Yes.” Castiel looked at him again, and Dean could have sworn those eyes weren’t made of plastic and electricity anymore. “I know what makes you happy.”

“Yeah?” Dean sighed, and yawned, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. “I suppose you do. But I wish you’d be a little more forthcoming about what makes _you_ happy.”

Castiel was silent for a moment, and then spoke with surprising sureness. “It makes me happy when you kiss me. I believe that is my favorite thing, of all things.”

Dean stared at him.

“In fact, I would like you to kiss me now,” Castiel added.

Dean began to grin. “I don’t always have to be the one initiating it, you know. You can kiss me, too.”

Castiel dithered, eyes wide.

Dean stretched luxuriously. “After all, I only just woke up,” he continued teasingly. “Maybe I’m still sleepy. Maybe I don’t want to do all the work. Maybe you ought to climb on top of me and kiss me awake, huh?”

Tentatively, but without hesitating any longer, Castiel wiggled towards him under the sheets and rested a hand on Dean’s chest. Dean hummed encouragingly, and the robot gained confidence, sitting up and crawling over to straddle Dean’s waist. Once settled, he took hold of the sheets and blankets and pulled them all the way up over their heads, so the two of them were in a tiny warm bed-cave together.

Dean chuckled, and was about to comment on how freaking adorable that was, but he had barely started to open his mouth when Castiel made his move, swooping down to press a hungry kiss to Dean’s lips. It was awkward but enthusiastic, and Dean felt his heart leap in his chest as he wrapped his arms around his little robot, holding him close and gently adjusting the kiss into something deeper and warmer and softer. With the boy’s body pressed so tightly against him, it was impossible not to feel the shuddering sigh of contentment that vibrated through the smaller form. But when it didn’t pass, Dean opened his eyes as Castiel’s fingers moved up to bury themselves in his hair.

He broke the kiss and mumbled into Castiel’s cheek “Hey, you’re shaking. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Castiel whispered back. “I’m... I was nervous about kissing you.”

“Why? It’s not like it’s anything new.”

“Yes, it is,” the robot insisted. “It’s new that I... that I want it. That I’m the one doing it. I’m doing it for me, as much as for you. That...” He pulled back a bit, and Dean saw his eyes glowing nervously in the darkness of their blanket-enclosed space. “It confuses me. To want things. To want you.”

These words sent a sort of aching thrill through Dean, and he reached up and pulled Castiel down into a more passionate kiss that ended with their positions reversed and the blankets mostly on the floor. Dean huffed a satisfied laugh into the boy’s neck that sent a tremor through the smaller form.

“Dean,” Castiel said in an irritated tone as he wriggled vainly in the man’s grasp. “Why are you laughing on my skin?”

Dean lifted his head. “Why do you even... Oh, wait a second. Don’t tell me you’re––” He cut himself off, ducking his head and buzzing his lips experimentally against Castiel’s neck again, the lightest of touches. Castiel squirmed more vigorously this time, and Dean’s eyes widened in delight. “Are you seriously telling me you’re ticklish?”

“I’m not telling you anything!” the robot protested.

“Of all the...” Dean shook his head with a grin. “How did I not know this till now? Oh, you and I are going to have fun with this, kiddo.”

“I don’t think it’s fun,” Castiel objected. “It makes me feel strange.”

Dean shrugged unsympathetically. “Them’s the breaks. Welcome to being ticklish.” Since they’d woken up so early, he decided there was plenty of time for a very objective and scientific investigation of this new capacity of Castiel’s, and so without further ado he ruthlessly set to work. By the time he judged the tickle-experiment completed, Castiel was a wheezing mess on the bed, tears pooling in his eyes and limbs rubber-like and useless.

“Are you done torturing me?” he gasped.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Dean admonished, giving the boy’s ribcage one last regretful tickle. “Yeah, I guess so. I would keep going, but I’m getting hungry. What do you say to breakfast in bed?”

“I don’t speak to food,” Castiel said with exasperation, weakly pulling himself up into a sitting position and collapsing against Dean’s side.

Dean fondly ruffled the mess of dark hair. “You stay here and recover. I’ll go grab something to eat, and then we can watch bad morning TV and make out during the commercials until lunchtime. All in favor, say ‘aye’.”

“Aye,” Castiel responded, and dared to give Dean one more quick kiss before falling back on the pillows in exhaustion. “The blankets are all on the floor,” he pointed out.

Dean crawled over him out of bed and gave a huge yawn before glancing down. “True, that.” He bent, gathered them up, and dumped them on the bed before realizing what he’d done. “Hey, aren’t you my house-bot? Aren’t you supposed to do this? Cleaning and chores and so on?”

“No, I am your sex-bot,” Castiel deadpanned. “I am supposed to cater to your wildest fantasies.” After saying this, he stretched in a manner that must have been carefully calculated to make his shirt ride up and reveal the tantalizing angle of a hipbone.

“You’d better watch out,” Dean growled. “Or I might forget to eat breakfast at all, and then I’d get hungry and grumpy and it would all be your fault.”

“You would deserve it for tickling me,” Castiel replied placidly, nestling into the blankets.

Dean muttered something vaguely annoyed, but he was unable to keep a dopey grin off his face as he took the stairs two at a time down to the kitchen. Humming to himself as he quickly fried some eggs and bacon, Dean caught sight of his own face reflected in the window above the sink and almost blushed at how stupidly happy he looked.

“Sheesh, come on,” he scolded himself. “It’s not like you’re in love or something.”

Thirty seconds later, the bacon was burning and Dean was staring unseeingly at it, the spatula forgotten in his hand.

Upstairs again, he automatically and unsuccessfully tried to tempt Castiel with the scent of the bacon (“You know very well that I have no interest in food, Dean”), but his heart wasn’t in it, and there ended up being a lot less making out during commercials and a lot more staring at nothing while Castiel shifted impatiently next to him. His own words kept glowing in virtual neon inside his head: _It’s not like you’re in love or something. IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE IN LOVE OR SOMETHING._

After Dean had eaten his breakfast, he told Castiel to earn his keep by washing the dishes, and despite the robot’s earlier playful arguments regarding his role, he meekly agreed, perhaps intimidated by Dean’s sudden mood swing.

Meanwhile, Dean headed into his small upstairs office and booted up his laptop, while the sounds of Castiel’s favorite Bach cantata began floating up from downstairs. It had taken some convincing for Castiel to feel confident enough to use the sound system and put on the music he liked, but once he did, Dean had found it fascinating to get one more angle into the boy’s mysterious mind. Even if he did tend to lean towards classical stuff. His robot seemed to have pretty high-brow tastes.

Dean went straight to the Quik-Answers website, created an account and typed fast before he could chicken out and close the browser.

_hypothetical question: so what if a scientist somehow made a robot that was identical to a young human boy in almost every way. would it be totally messed up if the scientist fell in love with his robot? would it be ethically okay or whatever?_

He categorized it under ‘philosophy’, submitted the question, and closed his eyes until the confirmation page had loaded.

“Dean?” came a query from behind him. Dean jumped and instinctively clicked the ‘x’.

“What?” he said gruffly, spinning in his chair to face Castiel.

The robot was hovering uncertainly in the doorway. “The dishes are done. I’m sorry if I interrupted you.” He hesitated, curiosity evident in his expression. “What are you doing?”

“None of your business,” Dean barked. “Go read a book or something.”

Castiel bit his lip and took a step back. “I thought we were going to make out until lunchtime,” he said in a very small voice. “It’s not lunchtime yet.”

“Change of plans. Go read a book,” Dean said shortly, spinning back around to face his computer. Hopefully the kid would get the hint and leave. He heard a tiny sigh from behind him, but finally Castiel seemed to give up and his steps padded softly away down the hall. Dean let out a whoosh of breath and stared blankly at the screen before opening up his browser again and logging into his email to see if anyone had responded to his question yet. Answers couldn’t come soon enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested, here's the Bach cantata chorus that Castiel listens to while washing the dishes.  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M2tG510Q_E


	13. Chapter 13

After half an hour of obsessively checking his email, Dean finally got a notification that there was an answer to his question. He eagerly clicked through to read it.

_WOW I coudn’t believe it! This a really effetive, new weight loss program the doctor’s dont want you to know about! My friends didn’t reconize me! check it out: http://bit.ly/15mTcHoP_

Dean groaned and pressed his hands to his eyes. Clearly, sitting at the computer and hitting refresh wasn’t going to solve anything. He needed to distract himself. He should probably check on Cas.

Downstairs, he ducked his head into the living room and saw Castiel lying on the couch, covered with his favorite blanket. His eyes were closed, and Dean hesitated before padding into the room and over to the couch. He touched the small form on the shoulder. “Castiel?”

The eyes opened and blue light shone out. “Hello, Dean.”

“Are you okay? Why were you lying there?”

Castiel sat up, holding onto the blanket. “I read a book as you instructed me to. It only took me ten minutes. Then I didn't feel like reading another book, so I decided to sleep until you wanted me."

“Oh.” Dean sat down on the couch. “Sorry about, y’know, snapping at you earlier.”

“Dean, I am accustomed to you,” Castiel said softly.

There was a short pause as they both sat there gazing at each other. After a minute Dean reached out and ruffled the boy’s hair, and got a small but radiant smile in return. It sent a sort of shaky rippling sensation through him, and he almost felt sick. How fucked up was he, to be falling in love with a robot?

“Dean?” Castiel asked. “What were you doing on the computer up there? I didn’t know you had another computer.”

“Yeah, that’s my personal computer.” Dean shrugged. “I use it for, I dunno, normal stuff. Like internet and games and so on. The one downstairs is just for experiments. Well, it used to be. Now it’s just for you.”

Castiel smiled again, and Dean forgot how to breathe for a brief moment. Yeah, he was way gone on the kid. It was incredible that he hadn’t noticed it until now. “I’ve read about the internet,” Castiel said. “But I don’t really understand the appeal. What can you do with the internet that you cannot do in everyday life?”

“Lots of stuff!” Dean argued. “The internet is amazing.” An idea struck him. “Want me to show you?”

He should have known this would be a bad idea. Not in a dangerous creepy robots-taking-over-the-world way. Just in a normal kid-plus-internet way. After a few minutes of explanation, Dean sat back and watched in wonder as Castiel discovered Google and YouTube and Tumblr in rapid succession.

The most amusing part was how quickly he got frustrated with the slowness of Dean’s computer. Dean prided himself on having a pretty nice setup, with most of his crap stored on externals and a bunch of extra memory he’d purchased to speed things up, but when confronted with a mind that worked as fast as Castiel’s, any computer would look slow in comparison.

Castiel tapped his fingers impatiently on the desk while waiting for each new page to load, until Dean slapped gently at his hand. “Quit it. That’s annoying.” So instead the robot began to spin around in the twirly chair while waiting for the computer to catch up with him. He quickly got distracted by this new game, though, and even after the page had finished loading, Castiel kept spinning merrily around. Dean was biting the inside of his cheek to try not to laugh, but when the boy finally clutched the table to stop himself, with a somewhat seasick look on his face, Dean couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Holy shit, you are the cutest freaking thing!” he gasped out between bubbles of laughter. “Did you make yourself dizzy?”

“Dean,” Castiel croaked. “I feel strange. The world appears to be turning very fast, which is of course true, but usually I do not perceive its motion in such a disturbing way.”

Dean cackled gleefully, reaching out and tugging Castiel up out of the chair into a quick hug. “I think you need to take a break from spinning, kiddo. I’m going to go downstairs and grab myself a beer. You sit in my non-twirly chair for a while.” He moved the wobbly robot into the other chair, and then pushed it in front of the desk. “There you go. I’m only going to let you play on the internet for a little while longer, though, and then we’re going to turn off the computer, okay?”

Castiel glanced up in horror.

“Not you,” Dean quickly reassured him. “Just the laptop. I don’t want you getting addicted.”

“I will not become addicted to the internet, Dean,” Castiel said haughtily, turning his attention back to the screen in front of him. “I would probably be able to read all of it in a few days, if your computer would only function at a reasonable speed.”

Still chuckling to himself, Dean left the room. Downstairs, he had just cracked open his beer when a thought entered his mind: had he cleared his browser history before letting Cas at the computer? Shit. He hadn’t.

Dean took the stairs back up two at a time and burst into his office. “Hey, I gotta do something real quick––”

Castiel turned and looked up at him with a small puzzled frown. On the screen was the Quik-Answers homepage. Dean swallowed. “Um, how did you... how did you find that site?”

Castiel glanced back at the screen. “It was saved in your bookmarks folder. It appears to be a large pool of mostly incorrect information provided by amateurs. I don’t understand its purpose. This game called Candy Crush, however, is most enjoyable.” He switched to another tab showing a bunch of pieces of candy stacked in a square.

Dean squinted at the candy, shrugged and shook his head. “Yeah, whatever. Here, just let me...” He lifted Castiel’s hand out of the way, getting a tiny rush at the passive trust with which the robot let himself be moved, and quickly cleared his history. “Okay, it’s all yours.”

It ended up proving quite difficult to coax Castiel away from the laptop, and Dean only managed it by promising him he could have another hour of computer time the next day. When he finally got it back for himself, the first thing Dean did was check his email. He had gotten three more answer notifications. In trepidation, he clicked ‘View Answers’.

Answer #1: _i dont think u can fall in love wiht a robot lol their not real lololol_

Answer #2: _Pedophile law only applies in the case of real human beings. So ethicaly speaking there would be no problem in the scenario your describing. Is this for a scifi book?_

Answer #3: _ummm I think first we need to look at the definition of love and say is love something that felt in a single direction or both directions like bilaterially feeling attraction or unrequitted which is the compromise but if you mean is it ok for a person to feel into one direction when the partner is not human being i think it is maybe such like the first poster say but if it is of two ways I believe it could not be the same scenario tha_

Dean rolled his eyes and hit the ‘x’. He should have known he wouldn’t get any real help from a site like this. Answer #2 was vaguely comforting, although the lack of spelling skills didn’t inspire great faith in this person’s familiarity with what they rather mysteriously referred to as ‘pedophile law’.

He was still staring blankly at the computer when he heard the doorbell ring. “Go away,” Dean muttered to himself. He wasn’t expecting anyone and didn’t feel like dealing with people right now.

But then a chill ran down his spine as he heard the unmistakable sound of the front door opening and the distant tones of Castiel’s voice saying politely “Hello, ma’am.”

“Oh fuck,” Dean whispered in sheer terror. This was bad. This was very very bad. He stood up and went to the door of the office, but he couldn’t figure out who Cas was talking to. So he tiptoed to the top of the stairs and went halfway down, just far enough so that he couldn’t be seen from the door but could hear everything that was going on. And as soon as he could make out the words, his expression of shock melted away instantly, to be replaced by a huge grin.

“It’s very important to ask yourself, what exactly does it mean to have a relationship with God?” Castiel was saying solemnly. “You may not pay much attention to the Lord, but you can be sure that he is paying a lot of attention to you. And when the Day of Judgment comes, we will all stand before him. Will you be ready to balance your account? Or do you need help? Because I know someone who is ready to help you at any time. His name is Jesus Christ, and you may not know him, but he knows you. He loves you and––ma’am? Where are you going?”

There was a brief silence, and then the door closed and footsteps came down the hall. When Castiel appeared, Dean began clapping. “That was beautiful!” he chortled. “Where the hell did you learn that?”

“I watched a video on YouTube,” Castiel said modestly. “That was your neighbor, by the way. She saw me the other day, when I came outside and collapsed. She was knocking on the door and saying she was going to call the police if you didn’t open up, so I thought it best to take matters into my own hands. I assume she will not bother us again. She did not appear interested in ensuring the eternal life of her soul.”

“Castiel, you’re the best,” Dean proclaimed. “I wish I could give you a present or something.”

“I––we could––maybe––” Castiel blushed beautifully, lowering his eyes before raising them again with a hopeful spark in them.

“Yeah, all right,” Dean chuckled. “You little horndog, you. I guess I still owe you a make-out session from this morning, huh?”

Castiel nodded eagerly. “I’ll go wait upstairs.”

Dean shook his head in amusement once he was alone. “I’m a lucky man.” He automatically headed for the fridge, but then stopped in his tracks when he remembered something. They hadn’t been intimate since Castiel had adjusted his programming. That meant the robot could now theoretically enjoy sex just as much as a human, without his system crashing, and without putting Dean’s anatomy in danger. This idea was so enticing that Dean forgot all about eating and turned around, heading straight for the stairs.

He had barely entered the bedroom before Castiel jumped on him, pressing him up against the wall with fervent anticipation. He lifted his face yearningly to Dean but wasn’t tall enough to kiss him from the ground, even on tiptoe. Dean smirked down at him, purposely pretending not to understand. “Hi, Cas. What do you want?”

“Dean... Dean... please!”

Dean took pity on him and reached down, hoisting the small body up in his arms. Castiel happily wrapped his legs around Dean’s waist and his arms around his neck, peppering his face with frantic kisses as Dean carried him easily over to the bed. But he didn’t let go even when Dean got on his hands and knees on the bed and gave a shake to try to dislodge him. “You little koala!” Dean laughed in surprise. “You gotta let go, if we’re ever going to get our clothes off.”

“I don’t care––clothes––just––touch me,” Castiel requested in breathy gasps.

“Hey, Cas, relax,” Dean ordered. He untangled the boy’s arms from around his neck and pushed him down flat on the bed with one hand. “What’s wrong? You’re so desperate all of a sudden.”

“It’s been three _days,_ Dean,” Castiel almost yowled. “I _need_ you!”

This statement was followed by a sudden heavy silence, as two pairs of eyes stared into each other in shock. “You need me,” Dean whispered. “ _You..._ need _me._ ”

“Ye-e-es,” Castiel whimpered, painfully obvious insecurity in the stretched-out syllable.

A tiny smile turned up the corner of Dean’s mouth. “Wow. Well... why didn’t you say something?”

“It’s not my place,” Castiel said in a tiny voice. “I’m... for you. You’re not for me.”

Dean gulped, and adjusted his position so he could gently run his fingers through Castiel’s hair and along his cheek, automatically stroking him to try to calm him down. He had to gather his thoughts before speaking in a low voice. “I can be for you, too. If you want. We can be for each other. Would you like that?”

“Yes, of course I would,” Castiel muttered, sounding almost irritated. “That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. But I don’t see how you could want something like me.”

“Not something like you,” Dean corrected him. “Someone like you. I don’t think I’d want another robot. In fact, I know I wouldn’t. I want you. Because of who you are. You’re special, Cas. And not because of how I made you. Because of how you are. Because of your... soul, or whatever.”

“Robots don’t have souls.” There were tears gathering in the boy’s eyes, but they hadn’t fallen yet.

“You know what?” Dean said with a lopsided grin. “I don’t think anyone understands souls enough to prove that robots don’t have ‘em. Not scientists, not the Church... nobody really knows what we talk about when we talk about souls. So as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got one. And it’s what makes you so wonderful.”

Castiel was starting to look like a deer in the headlights, and just in time, Dean remembered why.

“I know,” he rushed to comfort the boy. “I know you’re not set up to understand stuff like this. It’s not logical, and it doesn’t exist anywhere in your memory banks, so you don’t know how to process it. But hey, you don’t have to. Leave the processing to me. Focus on what you know and understand.”

“I know I’m supposed to provide pleasure to you,” Castiel said miserably. “And here I am wanting it for myself. I have failed in my only purpose. I am faulty. I am imperfect.”

“Yeah, you are,” Dean agreed.

Castiel looked up in shock, and Dean smiled at him for a moment, soft and proud, before continuing.

“Only machines are perfect. You’re getting more human every day.”

At this, the liquid in Castiel’s eyes finally spilled over. He didn’t make any sound, merely blinked rapidly as tears began to pour down his cheeks. Dean dipped his head and kissed the tears away, and after a minute he felt Castiel’s arms wrapping around his shoulders again. Dean settled over and around the smaller form, trying to shield him with his body and make him feel safe. After a while Castiel stopped crying, but he still held tightly to Dean.

Dean couldn’t help a little chuckle. "You know, for someone who always claimed to have no feelings, you sure turned out to be an emotional little thing."

“Don’t make fun of me, Dean,” Castiel huffed, blinking away the last few tears.

Feeling a sudden surge of strange warmth inside him, Dean pressed their foreheads together. "Hey. Hey, it's okay. Listen, this is a crazy journey, and I have no idea where it's taking us. But at least we're on it together, yeah?"

“Yeah, okay,” Castiel sniffed, and managed a pale smile. But it quickly faded to a severe look as he added “And now, I would like to have sex, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean answered playfully, and hurried to obey.

This time it was slower, gentler than before. Dean focused on his own sensations in order to share them with Castiel, but not so intensely that the boy got overwhelmed by them. Castiel was too emotionally exhausted to reach climax, and once Dean realized this, he didn’t push him. He was learning that Castiel could enjoy the intimacy of being together without necessarily needing a grand finale every time.

Afterwards, they lay together without speaking, wrapped up in each other’s embrace until Dean fell asleep. Castiel stayed awake for a little while longer, just resting his forehead against Dean’s. Eventually he took a long shaky breath and put himself into standby mode as well. Night fell around them, but neither one noticed.


	14. Chapter 14

In the small hours of the morning, Dean woke with a start, as if he’d been kicked. And he effectively had been, considering the force and speed with which a horrified realization had popped into his mind. “Castiel!” He sat up in the dark, almost shaking with tension. “Wake up.”

Two points of blue light appeared next to Dean. “Hello, Dean.”

“You talked to my neighbor,” Dean accused. “And she talked to you.”

Castiel slowly sat up as well. “Yes.”

“Don’t play dumb,” Dean growled. “You know what I’m talking about. The sound of any voice other than mine is supposed to make you automatically shut down. But it didn’t. You feel like explaining that?” His volume was slowly ramping up, as terror and anger battled for control of him.

There was a brief pause, and then Castiel answered. “Actually, yes.” His voice was a low dry tone Dean hadn’t heard before. “Come with me, Dean.” And with that, he climbed rapidly out of bed and headed for the door.

Before Dean could figure out what to do about this worrying reaction, Castiel had left the room. Dean stumbled out of bed and followed him. He could almost hear his own heart beating in the silence of the house.

Downstairs, Castiel had already turned on the monitor of the mainframe and was sitting in front of it with a strange look on his face, tired yet calmly determined. “Please sit down,” he invited Dean. “I would like to show you something.”

“What?” Dean snapped, still standing, arms crossed.

“Everything.” Castiel turned his baleful blue eyes on Dean. “I would like to explain to you, in detail, every single change I have ever made to my programming. It will take quite a while. I recommend that you sit.”

This surprised Dean so much that he swallowed, reached behind him, and drew up a chair before realizing that he had effectively just taken orders from his own robot.

Castiel began to speak. As he had predicted, it took quite a while. He scrolled carefully through the entire program, showing Dean every location where there had been any changes, and explaining with meticulous precision the nature of every single change he had made. Dean sat silently through it at first, but eventually, as his anger waned and his reluctant interest grew (the way in which Castiel coded, being a machine himself, was undeniably fascinating), he began asking questions. Castiel seemed relieved to have a bit of audience participation.

After a while, Dean had begun to pick up on the particularities of the ‘language’ that Castiel used to communicate with his own system, and he could begin interpreting the changes on his own. When they got to the SRF section, Castiel’s blushing function received another workout, which amused Dean even more. With a lopsided grin, he pulled the kid onto his lap and kept reading. Whenever he found something he couldn’t understand, he had a brief consultation with Castiel, but there were less and less of these as they went along.

When Dean finally reached the end of the program, he blinked tiredly a few times and became aware that the early morning sunlight was spilling in through the high-set basement windows. He also noticed that Castiel had gotten very quiet where he sat on Dean’s lap, face tucked into Dean’s shoulder and arms around him.

“Cas?” Dean said softly, giving the little body a gentle squeeze. With the robot pressed so close against him, he could feel the tiny whirring that started up inside Castiel as he awoke from standby mode.

“Mmmph?” Castiel mumbled grumpily into Dean’s neck.

Dean began to smile. “Did you... fall asleep? I mean, send yourself to sleep?”

“Yes.” Castiel sat up and squinted at Dean. “Have you finished reading everything?”

“Yeah.” Dean grimaced. “Listen, I... I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you up and yelled at you like that.”

As Dean now knew, Castiel had indeed taken the initiative to delete the bit of code that was supposed to tell his system to shut down upon hearing any voice other than Dean’s and his own. His reasoning, he had explained to Dean (this had been hours ago, around 3 a.m. or so) was that if Dean were ever in danger from another person, Castiel would want to be able to help him. There had been several similar changes as well; Castiel’s own adjustments, things that looked scary at first due to the alien quality of the coding language but turned out to be quite harmless.

Castiel frowned. “The only person whose sleep schedule has been disrupted here is you. I should be the one apologizing.”

“No. You did the right thing. I really...” Dean shook his head, unable to find the words he wanted. “It helps. To understand all that,” he finally said, and repeated “I’m sorry.”

Castiel gave him a sleepy smile and snuggled back up to him. “Are we okay now? Can we go back to bed?”

“No.” Dean stared at the monitor for a second. “There’s something I want to do.”

“What?” Castiel mumbled.

Instead of answering, Dean awkwardly began typing one-handed, still holding the boy on his lap with his other arm. After a few minutes the whirring inside Castiel quieted again. Dean kept typing.

A while later, Dean spoke softly. “Hey, Cas? I added something new. I want to tell you about it.”

Castiel hummed awake again and regarded Dean. “Oh. We’re still here. What is it?”

“I added this. Check it out.” Dean nodded at the screen.

Castiel followed the gesture and began to read. A moment later his eyes had gotten very wide.

“Dean, this... this means that now only I have the ability to turn myself on and off. You will no longer be able to do either one.”

Dean nodded. “You have a new shutdown option now. It leaves only the most basic level of your system functioning, just enough for you to have the juice to start yourself back up. Of course, you still have a permanent shutdown possibility too, but if you did that and then I restarted you... the drives would be wiped clean. You’d have no memory; you wouldn’t be Castiel anymore. So...” He forced a chuckle. “I recommend you don’t do that. Stick to the soft-shutdown option, so you can turn yourself on and off whenever you like.”

Castiel squinted in confusion at Dean. “Are you sure––is this really what you meant to write?”

“Yeah.” Dean looked at the screen for a moment longer, then nodded. “Yeah. It’s past time for that, actually.” After another moment, he yawned. “Now, I’m freaking exhausted. How about we go back to bed for a few hours?”

Castiel was in a contrary half-asleep mood and didn’t feel like walking, so Dean carried him back upstairs, even though the robot was just big enough to be somewhat ungainly in his arms. But he seemed to enjoy being carried, so Dean told himself he was taking one for the team.

As soon as they got back under the covers, Castiel cuddled up to Dean and promptly went back into standby. Dean held him for a while longer. His brain was buzzing, but it kept returning to one word, a word he’d never really spent a lot of time thinking about: _trust._

***

Over the next few days, Dean felt like there was something humming softly in the back of his brain that he couldn’t quite identify. He wasn’t even entirely aware of it – not until Castiel began looking at him strangely. Sitting in front of the television one evening with an arm slung around his robot’s shoulders, Dean suddenly realized that Castiel had been watching him instead of the TV for the past few minutes. “What?” he grumbled.

“I don’t know.” Castiel tipped his head to one side. “You’re different.”

“I don’t feel different.” Dean frowned. “Different how? Good, bad?”

“Good. I think.” And without further explanation, the boy snuggled down against him and turned his attention back to the television.

At that moment, the idea hit Dean like a ton of bricks. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but now that it was in his mind, it seemed like it had always been there. It was the natural next step. It was the right thing to do, and he knew it with a pure and absolute conviction that had arisen out of nowhere.

He fumbled for the remote, found it, and turned off the television. Castiel sat up and looked at him again.

“Cas, listen,” Dean said before the robot could speak. “I want to do something for you.”

“For me?” Castiel repeated in confusion.

“You’re always doing things for me. It’s not right. It’s a one-sided relationship. I know your purpose was originally to serve me or whatever, but I don’t want to go on like that. I want things to be more balanced and fair. I want to give you something.”

“There’s nothing I need, Dean.”

“Maybe not.” Dean clambered to his feet. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to give it to you.” He swallowed. “Castiel. I would have really liked to surprise you with this, but I think it’s important not to do this kind of thing without your consent. I want to give you complete control of your own system.”

Castiel’s eyes grew huge in a split-second.

“And if it’s at all possible,” Dean quickly continued, “I want to work on making you a little more portable. I don’t know how to shrink down the components of the mainframe so that the whole thing can fit inside you––I mean, inside your, um, chassis–” he gestured awkwardly at the boy sitting in front of him– “but I bet you know how to do it. We can figure it out together. And if we manage that, then you could go anywhere. We could go on trips together. Or, hell––” he chuckled wryly. “You could go on walks to get away from me when I’m being a dick. So, if you’re up for it, I’d like to propose that we work together to give you a little more control over your own life. What do you say?”

There was a very long silence, long enough that Dean began to feel weird. What if Castiel said he didn’t want to do it? What might that signify?

Finally, Castiel spoke, slowly, as if he’d had to dig out one thought from beneath a very large pile of them. “Why... why do you want to do this for me?”

“Because––” Dean’s voice stuck in his throat. He knew why. And if he didn’t speak the truth, he would be chickening out. But he couldn’t just say it. Not in so many words. “Because you’re... important to me. You’re pretty much the most important person in my life these days. And because I think you deserve it, you deserve so much more, more than I could ever give you. But this is something I can give you. So please... let me.”

Castiel gazed up at him, his eyes glowing with a light warmer than blue ought to be. “Yes. Yes, Dean.”


	15. Chapter 15

The process of shrinking Castiel-the-computer to fit entirely inside Castiel-the-boy was a long and painstaking one. Dean started after breakfast the next day, and worked steadily all day and night until past sunrise the next morning. Throughout the entire ordeal, Castiel stayed awake, as was his preference, and every time Dean came over to adjust a wire or test the placing of a component, he could feel those big blue eyes fixed on him worshipfully. The robot was quieter than usual while Dean was working on him, and he had brought down his blanket, but he didn’t seem to need to hold onto it. However, Dean noticed that it remained on the work table within arm’s reach at all times.

As Dean methodically transferred the entire computer program over so it was interfacing with the new smaller hardware components, he also edited the coding itself to make sure that Castiel would have full control over his system once everything was finished. Finally, his eyes and brain aching, Dean rubbed his temples and gave his robot a tired grin. “Okay, kid, you ready for blast-off? I’ve gotta shut you down briefly for the final switcheroo, but then we should be golden.”

Castiel nodded, biting his bottom lip. “Dean? Just in case... something happens... I want––”

“Nothing’s gonna happen,” Dean scoffed. “Practically your whole system is switched over at this point. I’ve just got to power-down the mainframe so that your new central computational controller – I’ve dubbed it the Triple-C – will be jump-started into doing its first self-initialization. It’ll be five seconds, no longer.” He gave Castiel a wink and a pat on the shoulder. “You’ll be right back.”

As he turned back to the mainframe, he noticed Castiel picking up the blanket and squeezing it tightly to his chest.

Admittedly, it felt a little strange after he’d hit the power button and turned back to see his robot in perfect stillness, eyes still open but dull and plastic. The next few seconds felt like an eternity. There was no sound but the ticking of the clock on the wall as Dean waited with bated breath. Finally, the silence was broken by a tiny click, followed by the familiar soft humming noise of Castiel ‘waking up’. Dean let out a sigh of relief to see the light returning to those two blue eyes.

“Hey, Cas. How do you feel?”

“Hello, Dean. I feel... okay,” Castiel said cautiously.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Five, Dean,” Castiel answered in a long-suffering tone.

“That’s right! Make it ten, buddy!” Dean leaned forward and held out his hand.

Castiel lifted his own, carefully weaved his fingers through Dean’s, and brought it down to his lap with a tiny smile.

“That wasn’t... you were supposed to... ah, fuck it,” Dean decided, took Castiel’s other hand as well, and leaned forward to plant a quick kiss on the boy’s lips. “Everything in working order?” He pulled away just in time to see the ardent glow of the LEDs rise and fade again as Castiel attempted to get control of himself.

“Yes. It... it just... it’s different.”

“I imagine.” Dean was about to say something else when Castiel frowned and spoke again.

“I feel somewhat weak. I think––I’m tired?”

“Oh.” Dean nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. I had to shrink the power center to make everything fit inside you, so your batteries will get drained a lot faster now. But if you sleep a few hours every night – that is, go into standby, you know what I mean – that’ll be more than enough to keep them charged and fresh. I don’t think you slept last night, did you? Do you want to take a nap now?”

Castiel was looking around him in a way that made Dean feel a little odd. A finger of something cold ran down his back, but he shook it off. Nothing had changed in the programming, not really – it had been purely a hardware adjustment, and now Castiel was an autonomous being. Just as Dean had promised him.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “I think I would like a nap.”

The weird feeling faded rapidly when they got upstairs and Dean felt his robot snuggle up against him in bed as usual. He was exhausted himself from the all-nighter he’d just pulled, and frankly he didn’t care if he ended up sleeping the day away.

***

Dean awoke abruptly at just past two in the afternoon to the feeling of a cold bed. The human-like warmth caused by the almost imperceptible but constant electric hum of Castiel’s system had vanished. When Dean opened his eyes and sat up in one swift movement, he could immediately see that the room was empty. “Castiel?” he called softly. If the robot was using the computer in the office down the hall, he ought to be able to hear him through the open door.

“Cas? You there?” Dean got up, ignoring his slippers, and headed out into the hall. A quick glance into the office, bathroom, and guest room showed that all three were unoccupied. Downstairs proved to be equally deserted, as did the basement. The cold frisson of dread from earlier was back with a vengeance. Not caring that he was dressed only in an old pair of boxers, Dean dashed out the front door and scanned the front lawn desperately. In vain. There was absolutely no sign of Castiel. The neighborhood was quiet, almost eerily empty; everyone was at work or at school.

“Castiel!” Dean yelled at the top of his voice. It echoed uncomfortably in the peaceful suburban surroundings, and there was no answer. Dean ran all the way to the end of the street before realizing how pointless it was to give chase. Castiel could be anywhere by now.

Back in his house, Dean got dressed in a daze. Then he made himself a sandwich. Then he threw the sandwich in the trash. Then he got a beer from the fridge. Then he took three fast gulps of the beer. Then he put the beer back in the fridge uncapped, and sat down at the table, and noticed his hands were shaking.

“Shit,” he breathed. What do you do when someone goes missing? What do you do when someone goes missing who isn’t legally your ward, who isn’t actually a ‘someone’, who isn’t technically supposed to exist at all? He certainly couldn’t go and report Castiel’s disappearance to the police. Could he put up posters? ‘Missing child’? Sure he could... but then, really, what good would that do? If Castiel didn’t want to come back, Dean didn’t want to force him. And actually, Castiel could probably overpower anyone who tried to bring him back by force. He knew where Dean lived, if he wanted to return. But why would he? Now he was free, he had the whole world to explore. He didn’t need to eat and needed very little sleep... he could do practically anything he wanted.

Dean didn’t cry. His eyes were dry. His throat was dry too. He didn’t know how to feel. What was Castiel going to do? Was he going to do something bad? He didn’t really know how the world worked. If he got hit by a car, it would probably destroy him. Now that his entire computer system was stored inside his body, he was much more delicate. If he had a serious accident, it could effectively kill him. There would be no point replacing artificial body parts if the inner programming that made Castiel Castiel was destroyed. “Why didn’t I ever teach him about looking both ways before crossing the street?” Dean mumbled aloud.

Slowly, his eyes focused, and he realized the refrigerator door was still half-open. He got up and pushed it closed. A thump came from inside the fridge. He opened the door again to see that his open bottle of beer, which had been placed too close to the door, was now rolling on its side, dispensing foamy liquid into the depths of the fridge. Dean stood there for a moment longer, until beer began dripping out onto the floor. Then he got a sponge and began slowly cleaning up the mess he had made.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *creeps shamefacedly back in*  
> Yeah, I know I was gone for stupidly long. And I left the story at a sad point. I'm sorry. Have this offering of a new chapter, including porn, to make up for it?
> 
> Also, here's my author promise: This story will NEVER be abandoned, not even if I go a year between updates (God forbid). I already have the whole thing mapped out and most of chapter 17 written, and I refuse to leave it incomplete.
> 
> warning for a scene including what could be interpreted as BDSM dynamics without prior discussion, and/or mild dubcon... although if you've read the story up to now, it's nothing new

Dean did absolutely nothing for the next few days. After two days he ran out of food, but he didn’t have the energy to go shopping, so he just started working his way through the canned stuff from the back of the cupboard. It was pretty gross, but he didn’t pay much attention to what he was eating anyway.

After four days, he woke up one morning to pouring rain. It wasn’t just a cloudburst; it lasted until almost noon. He opened the front door and stood there looking out into the rain for a good half-hour. He knew Castiel was mostly waterproof, but weather like this might really test that ‘mostly’. He hoped with a hope that was hard and painful that his boy had found somewhere to shelter. Or someone to shelter him. After a while he sat down in the open doorway, still staring unseeingly at the sheets of water pelting down. Only when it began to taper off and the postman arrived did Dean wake from his trance, nod awkwardly in greeting and go back inside.

That afternoon he went to the supermarket. Standing in the frozen goods aisle, he was struck by the realization that he’d never taken Castiel shopping. He could practically see how Cas would tip his head and narrow his eyes, take his time picking products, treating the whole endeavor as deadly serious despite his own lack of interest in food.

That night he watched a movie. It was the first time he’d watched a movie alone in a while. What exactly was a ‘while’? Part of his brain immediately wanted to calculate how long he’d been with Castiel – how long had it been before his paradise had come crashing down around him? – but a wiser part of him said no. It would do him no good to know the number of days. It would be a better idea to watch this movie and forget about everything.

He didn’t forget about everything. He didn’t forget about anything. He lay in bed and wrapped his hand around his dick and squeezed his eyes tight shut because it hurt more than it felt good. And later, alone in the dark, he tried to cry. But he couldn’t. He felt dry and empty inside.

There was hot weather and no more rain for weeks, and people started watering their lawns. After three weeks it was officially declared a drought, and people were told to stop watering their lawns. Of course, they kept doing it anyway. Mostly at night, so they wouldn’t get caught by the local authorities.

One week into the drought. It was almost midnight when Dean was suddenly woken up by something. He blinked into the darkness in confusion. Under his window, his next-door neighbor’s sprinkler was whispering away as usual. He had almost drifted off again when his room was illuminated with a flash of white light, and a few seconds later, he heard it: an ominous roll of distant thunder. He lay there in the silence for a moment. In his half-conscious state he was almost happy, despite the aching emptiness inside him. There’s something grand and terrible and glorious about the the rapid, inevitable approach of a thunderstorm. Another flash came a minute later, and immediately on its heels, a second clap of thunder. This one was moving in fast. For a moment Dean thought he heard the sound of the neighbor’s sprinkler growing louder and faster, and then he realized what it was. Rain. Finally.

“Ah, crap.” He’d just remembered he’d left the windows open, in the hall and in the office. Probably the window above the kitchen sink downstairs as well. With a groan, Dean got up and headed out into the hall. The rain was already pouring down outside, reminding him of that day more than a month ago when he’d sat in the doorway alone as it came down in torrents all morning. _Like a cow pissing on a flat rock,_ his dad would say. Dean grimaced, struggling with the window in the hall, which always stuck when it was humid. He hated it when his father’s words randomly sprang into his head. It hadn’t happened in a while.

Having taken care of the windows upstairs, Dean headed down to the kitchen and checked the one over the sink. It was small enough that nothing was coming in. He could leave it open. A thought struck him. The computer downstairs, the one that used to house Castiel’s programming – it ought to be unplugged until the storm had passed. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, he believed, especially when you had a basement full of expensive electronics.

He headed down the staircase into the dark, not bothering to hit the light switch; the high-set basement windows all around the room let in the regular flashes of lightning, and the glowing lights of his various electronic devices were like friendly eyes in the dark. He found the plug of the main surge protector by touch and tugged it out of the wall. All those little lights blinked out.

Except for two.

Over below the biggest window, in the dark below the work table, two small blue lights were glowing. Dean’s heart leapt into his throat. He opened his mouth and closed it again. As if hypnotized, he took a few steps forward. Then another bolt of lightning, the biggest one yet, threw the entire room into sharp relief. In the instant of illumination, Dean saw two things: the window above the work table was unfastened, and below the table, a shape was huddled that he would have recognized anywhere.

“Cas?” he croaked.

Now dim in the darkness again, the shape uncurled a bit and moved forward. “Dean?” The voice sounded rusty and frightened.

“Oh my god, Castiel...” In shock, Dean fell to his knees and peered half-blind into the dark. “It’s you.”

At these words, something seemed to be set free in the small form, and Castiel hurled himself across the dark room into Dean’s arms. “Dean!” he cried, and before Dean knew it, two tiny strong arms were clutching onto him and Castiel’s face was buried in his chest, his wet hair dripping everywhere. “Dean, please, please...” he was whimpering, moving desperately against Dean as if to remind himself that the man was real. “It’s been so long––I need you––”

“You need me?!” Dean repeated, untangling Castiel’s arms and forcefully holding the little body at bay as sudden anger rose in him. “I wasn’t exactly hiding from you! What the hell did you think you were doing? Where were you, you fucking idiot? You could have been killed!”

“I––” Castiel gasped weakly, and finally stopped struggling and reaching for Dean. “I went out into the world to see if I was missing anything by being with you.”

Dean caught his breath. “And?”

“And I am. I’m missing a lot.”

Dean had not expected this answer, but what he’d expected even less were the words that followed it.

“And I don’t care. Because I want you. Everyone has to make choices. You can’t have everything. I could have lots of other things, but I don’t want them. I want you.”

“Yeah?” Dean breathed, partially in shock.

“Yes!” Castiel wriggled again, trying to escape Dean’s grip and jump on him again. “I _want_ you, Dean. _Now!_ ”

“Oh, that’s what you mean,” Dean said, a bemused smile of understanding growing wider as he adjusted his grip on the boy. “So I take it you didn’t go hop into bed with somebody else while you were gone?”

“No!” Castiel sounded offended at the very idea. “You’re the only one, Dean. And I’ve missed you so much. I don’t need the world when I’ve got you.”

“Well,” Dean mused, half to himself. “Maybe we can have some of both: the world and each other.”

“Yes, okay, whatever!” Castiel squirmed again, more violently than before, and almost slipped Dean’s grasp. But the larger man moved forward, throwing him onto his back on the floor and pinning him down in a single motion.

“Now hang on, you little spitfire,” Dean admonished him in a low tone. “You can’t run away from me for a whole damn month and scare the hell out of me, then come back and jump my bones and everything’s hunky dory! That’s not how it works.” He was practically growling by now, and he noticed that Castiel’s eyes glowed brighter at the tone of his voice.

“Oh... it’s not?” He looked smaller than usual from his position on the floor between Dean’s legs, with Dean’s hands holding down his skinny shoulders.

“No. It’s not.” Dean’s rage was rapidly giving way to relief, but he figured the kid didn’t need to know that yet. Of course he was surely able to sense that Dean wasn’t entirely angry at him, due to their sympathetic emotional connection, but it wouldn’t hurt to remind the little brat of what he used to insist so emphatically was his role: to serve and please.

Yes, Dean thought it was about time for a lesson.

“You’re mine,” he breathed in the boy’s ear, and didn’t miss the tremble of ecstasy that went through the delicate form in response. “I don’t mean mine because I made you, or mine because I own you. I mean ‘mine’ in the way that two human beings decide to belong to each other. We clear on that?”

“Yes, Dean.”

Dean shifted his position, pressing down a little more heavily on the small body beneath him, and continued. “You can’t fuckin’ run away like that. And when I say that, I don’t mean that I’m forbidding you to leave the house. I mean that this last month without you, not knowing where you were or if you’d ever come back, thinking you might be smashed and broken into a thousand pieces in a ditch somewhere, thinking maybe you had been waiting all along for the first chance to escape me––it was the worst month of my life.”

“I didn’t want to escape you!” Castiel insisted, and Dean thought he felt an extra surge of humming energy rush along the robot’s limbs. “I missed you so badly, Dean, but I wanted to be sure... before I came back...”

“Be quiet,” Dean said, his tone gentle but authoritative. “This is me talking to you right now. You can talk to me later. I think I deserve this, don’t you?”

The limpness of Castiel’s body in response to this almost felt like relief, and when he nodded, his eyes were shining even more brightly. Dean hadn’t been sure where he was going to take this whole scene, but the boy seemed thrilled to be bossed around, and that was definitely... interesting. Maybe he could use that to his advantage.

Part of Dean wanted nothing more than to pounce on Castiel and kiss him until they were both sated, but he knew how much the kid liked kisses, so he decided to keep that card in his deck for now. Instead, he closed his eyes and focused with all his might on directing the remnants of rage still coiling inside him towards desire instead. It wasn’t difficult, due to their position and closeness after so long apart.

Dean had barely started controlling and focusing his thoughts before he heard a helpless, wanton mewling from beneath him, and Castiel started twitching and struggling again. Dean grinned but kept his eyes shut and didn’t move, continuing to mercilessly, single-mindedly imagine all the things he’d missed doing to Castiel. The whimpers quickly became sobs, and he cracked an eye open, feeling Castiel’s hands pawing desperately at his arms.

“Oh, you’re really aching for it, aren’t you, Cas? Did you get extra sensitive to my mental vibes after so much time away from me? Maybe you’ve learned your lesson and won’t do that again.”

“No, never, Dean... please... !” Castiel was already delirious with desire, his body twisting with longing where it was pinioned under Dean’s weight. “I need you so badly, Dean, please, now, please...”

Dean had intended to draw out the torture much longer, really make the kid understand that he was being punished, but he couldn’t do it. Castiel wasn’t the only one who’d been celibate for a month, and the remaining fury and hurt mixing in his gut needed an outlet, fast.

With a huff of dry laughter at Castiel’s inability to lie still, Dean got to his feet, pulling the kid up with him. The flashes of lightning were only intermittent now, and the rain was sluicing down outside, so loud Dean had to raise his voice to make himself heard. “Lube. Just a little.” In a few swift motions he had removed Castiel’s clothing (which was still soaked from the rain) and unzipped his own fly, giving himself a few rough strokes.

“Oh, yes,” Castiel gasped at Dean’s words, even as his brows drew together in confusion. “But... right here?”

“I said, I’m doing the talkin’,” Dean announced, maneuvering the smaller figure into the corner. Once Castiel’s back was against the wall, Dean grabbed a slender thigh in each hand and lifted them without too much trouble, sliding the boy up the wall. Castiel’s eyes got huge as he realized what was about to happen, and the lights glowed as brightly as Dean had ever seen. “Hope you’re lubed,” Dean added, and began lowering Castiel – rapidly – onto his erect cock.

The boy let out a wail of shock or ecstasy – or both – as Dean breached him, pushing into his barely-slicked channel without pause and hissing at the sensation; after a month away, Castiel had apparently tightened up from lack of use.

Dean wasn’t as young as he used to be, and Castiel was heavier than before with his computer parts inside him, but the adrenaline of the moment gave Dean enough strength and determination to start thrusting hard, bouncing Cas on his cock as if the boy weighed nothing at all. Castiel seemed utterly overwhelmed by the sensations – his mouth hung open in shock but no sound came out as he stared wide-eyed at Dean’s face in the semi-dark. His arms clutched at Dean’s neck and his small body trembled with each thrust, sliding slightly up and down the wall.

In only a few minutes, his thighs began to shake where they were wrapped around Dean’s hips. Dean caught one more glimpse of the blinding blue light before Castiel buried his face in the man’s shoulder and a full-body shudder went through him from head to toe. Dean could feel him clenching rhythmically inside, just enough to provide that perfect stimulation and send Dean over the edge himself. His own legs gave out as his orgasm hit, and the two of them collapsed to the floor in a heap, gasping for breath and still completely wrapped up in each other.

The silence stretched on, as breathing patterns slowed and quieted in the dark, and finally it was complete. After a minute, Dean broke it, mumbling into Castiel’s hair: “I missed you too, Cas. Please don’t leave me again.”

“I won’t,” the boy replied softly. Then, even quieter, he added something else. Dean’s tired brain couldn’t quite parse it, but it sounded like ‘of you’. Possibly ‘all of you’. Probably ‘I want all of you’ – that must have been it.

“Aw, shut up,” Dean muttered with a smirk. “Needy little thing.”

He wasn’t sure how they managed to get upstairs and into bed, considering how physically and emotionally exhausted they both were, but soon he had his robot snuggled up against him under the blankets. Dean let out a long breath. He hadn’t realized until right now exactly how much he’d missed this, the pure comfort of cuddling with Castiel... the two of them alone, safe from the world. No matter what, they had each other. A weird pang of emotion struck Dean unexpectedly, and he placed a kiss on Castiel’s tousled hair.

“Listen, Cas. We need to talk tomorrow,” he whispered.

“About what?” the boy whispered back.

“A lot of things.”

He could feel Castiel’s body tense slightly. “Is it bad?”

Dean smiled up at the ceiling before answering. “No, it’s not bad.” He considered for a moment before adding “In fact, it might even be good.”

Castiel relaxed and tucked himself even more tightly into Dean’s arms. “Okay. Good night, Dean.”

“Good night, baby.”


End file.
